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Old 17-06-2016, 06:24 PM
glend (Glen)
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Join Date: Jun 2013
Location: Lake Macquarie
Posts: 7,033
ZWO Teamview Testing

OK the Teamview session with Sam is finished. From what I could observe here is what was involved.

- Upgrade of some WIN related items
- Upgrade of the USB3 Microsoft driver to an Intel USB3 driver.
- Extensive testing of frame stability (minimise drop frames) in Sharpcap 2.8. This was done by trying the various drivers to determine minimal (0) dropped frames while maintaining a good histrogram. A continuous stream of 2" frames were used
- Extensive testing of short Darks (or long Bias) frames in SGP. The method used was continuous Frame and Focus shots, 4 sec duration, and 4x4 bin, with the histrogram stretched. Interesting was the behaviour of the histogram with differing drivers loaded. The .8 Driver was noticably worse than the .5 Driver. What seemed to be the desired result was a good bell shaped histogram, without any shape change over long numbers of frames. Occassionally the frame would jump, and the histogram would change, some had long tails towards the white side. The .5 driver was the best at maintaining stable bell shaped histograms.
- Importantly SGP .15 exhibited no Frame and Focus freezing during the long stream of continuous frames.

During this testing, Sam tried various driver changes, including a camera driver and the ASCOM driver range. There maybe other things I missed.

Sam had this summary:

- He upgraded the FPGA code in my camera (Firmware upgrade), I have a version number off the file but do not know if this is just a test version or slated for production..What is a FPGA you ask? I had to do a search to find out, it is a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) which is an integrated circuit designed to be configured by a customer or a designer after manufacturing – hence "field-programmable".
- Verified that ASCOM .5 is the most stable for me.
- Asked me to do more imaging testing and provide feedback.

I am very grateful to Sam for taking the time to get inside my system and test. I don't know how much user platform testing has been carried out, and I acknowledge that they can't provide this service to everyone. So thank you Sam.

As is to be expected, the cloud has moved in now and the forecast says four days of rain, so imaging is going to have to wait. My take away from today was some knowledge of how ZWO test and I think I can use these techniques to keep an eye on camera and application performance.
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