SAC 8-II Woes

I purchased a used SAC 8-II off astromart a few weeks ago after which it promptly sat in the box apart from a cursory examination. The intent was to use it as a light-weight autoguider. I quickly installed the software and "tested" it without being attached to anything. I was getting a signal out of the camera, the drivers all seemed to connect just fine, then I headed out to a dark-sky site for testing.

Oops, nothing worked. Well, it gave the appearance of working, but it wasn’t. Some more poking around and I realized the output wasn’t changing when simply exposed to light versus being capped. I sat up inside the house, reinstalled all of the drivers, checked my parallel port options and discovered the port was set to bi-directional mode instead of ECP. Changed that, rebooted, voile, the camera appeared to work. Alas, the weather didn’t cooperate. I should have put tried pointing it at daylight scenery, but the days were busy, too.

Retry at home. The combination of flip-mirror and camera won’t reach focus on my f/5 refractor. Sigh. I’m not short by much, perhaps only a few millimeters. But once again, I was having trouble with the SAC 8-II and had to find focus with my trusty (unmodified) ToUCam 740. Back indoors….

The SAC 8-II is now showing intermittent connectivity. The truth is, every "test" up until now was too short to have seen this. My first attempt didn’t check light vs capped behavior. My second did, but it was daytime and I quit as soon as I "succeeded." Now I’m trying to run the camera and it starts out giving images, then poof! Nothing. Stopping the image acquisiting software, unplugging the USB cable, wait a second or two, plug it back in, start the software and it works again. For 10, maybe 20 seconds.

I’ve posted on the SAC imaging group (Yahoo) hoping there is a configuration problem somewhere. There is a note in the install manual that "some users" have reported "problems with IBM parallel ports" all sufficiently vague as to be unhelpful. So maybe my Thinkpad T30 is to blame, but it’s not like I’m going to go buy another laptop for this and no one even makes one with a parallel port anymore.