Some newbie questions

lorenzo

Hi all. I recently purchased an ASI120MC and I have two basic questions.

First: is there any plan to make that camera running on a virtual machine? I am used to run WinXP on VirtualBox under Win7 64 bit. I installed ASI driver, but the camera simply doesn't connect. I read in the forum that virtual machines are not supported. Is there any workaround?

Second: in Win7 64 bit all is right, but... when I try to plug the camera in a USB3 port, no preview is showed, in any capture software : . BTW, the camera is listed and running in the Device Manager. My laptop is an ASUS N75SF, Intel core i7 w/ 6GB ram. What's happen?

Thanks in advance.

Ciao

Lorenzo

Italy

riklaunim

Not every USB3 chipset is supported from what I've read.

perene

I have a few questions about this camera too, please allow me to post them here.

I am going to purchase the ASI 120MC camera in the next months, my 1st telescope (Maksutov 90mm) will arrive in March. I never used any camera of this kind and telescope.

These are my questions...

1) After pluging the camera to the telescope, can I record whatever I am pointing for an extended period of time? Let's say, from 7 to 10 PM?

2) If I decide to record whatever I am seeing in the best image quality (1200?), how much disk space I need? Can you tell me how much disk space this camera will spend? For example, 10 MB/second, 20 MB/minute, figures like that, for me to calculate things?

3) If I point this camera to the Moon surface or any other sight from the sky, after X minutes (or seconds?) will this sort of thing happen with the image?

~~I mean, the object "moving", and the same thing not happening if you point the telescope+camera to objects from Earth?~~

Sam@ZWO

@Lorenzo

there is some compitable problem with USB3.0 port

but virtual machine under windows should be ok.

just some problem under Mac OS.

We can update the firmware to make it more compitable but the new firmware is slower.

@Perene

1)I see the program like firecapture of sharpcap only allow to capture periodically.

you can set a delay between 2 capture.

2)ASI120MM's fastest speed is 1280*960*30=36M/s

3)this will happen without tracking! so you need a motor tacking mount

lorenzo

Sam wrote:
there is some compitable problem with USB3.0 port

but virtual machine under windows should be ok.

just some problem under Mac OS.

We can update the firmware to make it more compitable but the new firmware is slower.

Sam, thank you for the reply, but I have still problems with VirtualBox. It seems that Fire capture, Sharpcap and Amcap under WinXP running in Virtualbox do not recognize the camera. I say that because the Device Manager lists the camera as installed correctly. In Firecapture the message is "capture failed" in the preview window. The strange thing is that's happen with ALL the softwares.

How can I figure that?

BTW, a fresh installation under WinXP (not running under virtual machine) on the same computer (second bootable hard disk) runs good.

Help me please!!!

About the USB3, I think you should figure out this issue, mainly because the most recent laptops sport almost all USB3 ports. Any plan?

Thanks a lot for the help.

Ciao

Lorenzo

Sam@ZWO

please contact me to get the firmware upgrade tool.wen(at)zwoptical.com

although we can't promise to solve this problem but let's have a try

shaunbrodie

Hello,

I just received my camera and can get it to work properly using an XP machine plus a Windows 8 machine but I was really hoping to use it on a Mac Mini running Windows 8.1 as a virtual machine (using VMware Fusion on my Mac Mini). I can connect to the camera but all I can capture is black images; could this be a symptom of the USB 3.0 problem mentioned previously? If so, can I try the updated firmware as well? Thank you for your help.

Shaun

Sam@ZWO

we need to upgrade the firmware to fix this problem

we will open this tool soon

also we just release our SDK on Mac,

so I think more native app can be used in the near future