DLL crashing PSRemote

[digster]

I'm using a Canon PowerShot S30 to capture one shot every 4 minutes and save it to a folder. Then, I'm using a little homegrown .NET app to take that file, crop it, resize it, FTP it to my live site, and then delete it.

Everything worked fine with Canon's built-in RemoteCapture program except for that the program kind of sucks (as you know from developing your own much better PSRemote program). But it seems that when I use PSRemote instead, the Canon dll will crash causing PSRemote to crash. This generally happens after several hours of operation. Sometimes it will go a little longer, like maybe 24 hours or so, but PSRemote will eventually crash out... causing me to have to restart my machine (Sony VAIO laptop, XP Home).

I read something about unregistering the camera for events, but I tried that and it didn't seem to solve the problem. Any ideas?

[Chris Breeze]

Have you tried downloading and installing the Canon WIA drivers? On Windows XP you don't normally need to install the drivers but I have had reports of problems connecting on some systems which were fixed by using the Canon drivers. You can download the drivers from www.powershot.com

[digster]

Yep, in fact, I just completely flattened my Vaio and reinstalled XP and all of the latest patches. That was a fun experience, especially considering that all I'm asking out of my Vaio is for it to do this ONE thing right :).

So now it appears to be able to go almost 48 hours without crashing, but then the crash is the same as before. I have the latest PSRemote along with all of the latest Canon drivers. Any ideas? What could possibly change during the 24-48 hours that it runs which would cause a crash? I'm just snapping a photo every 4 minutes.

[digster]

Hmmm... nevermind. It doesn't seemed to have increased the amount of time I can run it at all. After I restarted from the last crash, it crashed again a mere three hours later. And once again, this is a pristine XP SP2 system with zero modifications. How weird.

I think I'll probably try and get ahold of the Canon SDK and write a mini-app which just snaps a shot and saves it. Since my feature requirements are so miniscule, perhaps cutting out the rest of the app will cut out whatever problems are occurring. Never written an app before though... this might be painful!

[Chris Breeze]

I don't have an S30 to test this, but I haven't had any problems with a PowerShot A80 - it will run for several hours before the batteries die.
I did find a problem with the PowerShot Pro1 which consistently stopped working after just over 3200 images. I don't know whether this was due to a firmware or a driver problem. Does your setup fail after a consistent number of images?

[digster]

Nope, it fails randomly. Sometimes after an hour, sometimes after a day or so. Really, really weird. I read something in the Canon SDK (which I just downloaded) about how "periodically" the dll will communicate with the camera and that no operations should be performed during this time. I wonder if maybe that's causing it? For instance, if it happens to snap a shot during this brief period, maybe it craps out?

I wish I knew how to interpret crash reports.

[digster]

Chris:

I don't know if this is of any help to you but this is the error which appears in the Event Viewer log every single time PSRemote crashes. Any idea what this means?

Faulting application psremote.exe, version 1.4.0.0, faulting module cdsdk.dll, version 7.1.0.12, fault address 0x00001ac9.