ZWO ASI User manual

ZWO ASI Camera
Quick Guide
苏州振旺光电有限公司
Suzhou ZWO Co.,Ltd.
Thank you for purchasing a ZWO ASI camera. This guide is brief summary of the
installation procedure to get you up and running with your new camera. Please be sure to
read the user manual for more complete instructions.

Driver and software installation (Windows)
1. Download and install “ASI Cameras driver”from our website
https://astronomy-imaging-camera.com/software/ or CD-ROM.
After plugging in the camera, you will see your ZWO camera model listed
under the “imaging devices” category of the Device Manager if the driver
is installed successfully.
2. Download and install SharpCap (image capture software) from our
website or CD-ROM. Choose your camera modelfrom the cameramenu.
Then you can see the preview video. Keep in mind that you will only see
some brightness in the preview video without lens or scope.
More detailed user manual can be found at our website:
https://astronomy-imaging-camera.com/manuals/
Adjust the resolution
Adjust the exposure
time
Adjust the gain
Adjust the USB traffic
Here is the current FPS

Connecting the camera to the telescope
The following cameras include an all sky lens:
ASI120MM/MC ASI120MM-S/MC-S ASI178MM/MC
ASI290MM/MC ASI185MC ASI224MC
Please remove the lens before attaching the camera to your telescope.
Take off the lens
Screw the 1.25”nose-piece
Focusthrough the eyepiece
Replace the eyepiece with camera
Connect the USB2.0/3.0 cable
Refocus so camera image is sharp

Trouble shooting:
1. The preview image is completely white but the fps is normal.
The camera is over exposed, please reduce the exposure and/or gain.
Keep in mind that you can only see brightness without lens or scope
2. The preview screen is black and the fps is “0”.
Please try to slow down the capture speed by reducing the “Turbo USB”.
Also try connecting the camera to your PC directly without a USB hub or
extender if reducing “Turbo USB” still does not work.

3. The camera can`t preview at the FPS declared in the specifications.
1) Please make sure the camera is connected to USB3.0 host if it’s a
USB3.0 camera. Check that the camera is recognized as “via USB3.0”.
Please try to update the computer`s USB Host Controller driver if not.
2) Make sure that the “High Speed Mode” is On.
3) Adjust “Turbo USB”, we recommend 80-90%. This value depends on
your computer, higher means faster.
4) Don`t forget the exposure time affects FPS too. In general your
exposure time needs to be shorter than 1/FPS rate. For example, the
FPS will decrease to 1FPS when the exposure time is 1 second.
4. The camera can preview at 60fps but drops to 20fps when recording.
This is because your hard disk drive cannot match the speed of the
camera. Most ASI cameras are very fast and require up to 400M/s data
transfer speed. But most hard disk driver can only run at 40-50M/s.
We recommend you can exchange your HDD with one fast SSD and try
to capture the data in raw format instead of RGB24 if you use one color
camera.

5. The camera cannot run continually on a laptop without external power
This is because of the power save mode of your laptop, you need to
disable power saving of USB port.
6. There is a yellow hint with the camera model name and error code 10.
You may have this problem with our USB2.0 cameras, please try
another USB Port or PC, then you can upgrade the firmware of this
camera onthe good PC. The original firmware is more stable andfaster.
Download this upgrade tool from our website
http://astronomy-imaging-camera.com/software/FWTool.zip

7. Unknown device shown under the device manager after plugging in the
camera.
This is because the driver in not installed or installed properly, please try
to close all anti-virus software and re-install the driver.
You can also update the driver manually if re-installation still does not
work.
Right click the “Unknown device”, choose the “Update Driver Software”
and point to the driver directory. Normally the driver directory is :
C:\Program Files (x86)\ZWO Design\ZWO_USB_Cameras_driver.

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苏州振旺光电有限公司
SuZhou ZWO Co,. Ltd.
Tel: [phone]
Website: https://astronomy-imaging-camera.com
E-mail:[e-mail]
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Forum: http://zwoug.org/
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