Camera driver causing blue screens

[Leo.G]

We were out last night trying to capture Jupiter and M42 with a firewire ImagingSource camera (8" GSO Newtonian) and the camera driver seemed to be causing blue screens, one after the other.
The camera is a DBK21AF04-AS.
We have the latest driver in an old HP laptop running Windows 7 and my question is would rolling back to an older driver perhaps resolve this issue?


I wasn't sure whether to put this in software and computers but it is the camera driver which is responsible for the blue screens (yes, software I know).
It's a bloody nuisance to be honest, the computer was off more than t was on and it's a long time between booting.


At least we had a clear night last night, I took a chance with strong winds and a lot of cloud when setting up but the sky and night ended up being magnificent, except for the dew which eventually found it's way onto the secondary and made focus impossible. At least it wasn't rain and my hair dryer soon sorted that out.

[JA]

Hi Leo,
Sorry to hear of your troubles, and whilst I don't have specific experience with that camera, perhaps by way of diagnostics that might help lead you down the path to a solution to your problem, consider:

1. Does that laptop boot OK with the camera disconnected?
2. Do you have another firewire cable you could use to test if it is a cable fault?
3. Did the camera previously work on that laptop?
4. Are you able to test the camera on another PC or laptop?

Good luck in the hunt.

Best
JA

[Leo.G]

Thanks JA!



The blue screen error code (tisdcam_4401.sys) points directly towards the driver file being the issue. This is the camera and the driver file version. The problem didn't exist on an old desktop which is too large and heavy to be dragging in and out and it is an AMD based system as is driver file. The laptop is Intel and runs an Intel based driver which is different to the AMD one. The AMD system however suffered from a bandwidth issue. It's an old system I guess, as is all of our computer gear. We blow it all out somewhat regularly with a compressor and replace thermal compound on a regular basis. The issue with thermal compound originally resulted in 2 new replacement mother boards for the HP enterprise class laptop I bought my son in 2011. An engineer from HP came out both times to change it, 3 year warranty. After the warranty expired and USB ports and other peripheral ports started dropping out on odd occasions we found new thermal compound and a good blow out fixed it every time. Laptops are somewhat prone to heat and we've long learned thermal compound is cheap and relatively easy to do (I have IT qualifications, my son is just very smart) and do it on all of our systems, and anyone else's system we get called to repair (mostly just friends who get free service).


My son managed to find an earlier version of the driver and we're going to try that, cable and everything is OK as is the laptop.
Imagingsource aren't great for information or anything else but I've managed to get information from a few sources, the rest is suck it and see, like most astronomy related things I guess.
It's an old camera (as is firewire) but it's in nice condition and was given to me. It's so much lighter than the Nikon D810 and I'm keen to play.