BackyardNIKON locks up with D80

[dkrismer]

I am trying to figure out how to connect to my D80 and I have both the regular USB cable connected to the camera USB port and the DSUSB box and cable from Shoestring Astronomy connected to the four pin remote connector port on the camera.  I am able to connect to the camera and appears to be a good connection.  When running a couple test shots sometime it works and remote triggers the camera, then locks up during what looks like a download operation.  The error on the laptop I am getting is a "PC ran into a problem and needs to restart....".  Stalls out there until I do a hard reboot.  The stop code is: DRIVER POWER STATE FAILURE.

Any ideas?

Dave Krismer
Snohomish, WA

[astroman133]

First, according to the Supported Cameras table for BYN you must be running BYN in "Vista SP2 compatibility mode".

Next, make sure that the camera has good power (fully charged battery or A/C adapter), that the camera is directly connected to the PC with a USB cable that is known to be good, and that no other USB devices are connected, except for potentially  a keyboard and a mouse. Low-end PC's sometimes have low-end built-in USB hubs and astronomy software can overload them. This shows up as a disconnect or download failure.

Then, to eliminate a problem with the DSUSB cable, try shooting short exposures (less than 1 second) where the camera times the exposure. These short exposures do not use the DSUSB cable. The DSUSB cable is only used for BULB exposures.

Finally, as a test, you might try disabling your anti-virus software. It might be preventing the image from downloading. Also save your image only to the PC, not to PC and camera's memory card.

 

[admin]

Ummm... just out of curiosity.... is your computer (or hard drive) set to go to sleep after a period of inactivity?  Make sure they are not.  It's probably not the cause but it is worth checking.