STXL-6303 images contain only zero values

Hi folks,

We have the above camera (S/N X14020329) and were doing some tests before starting a disassembly experiment in order to repurpose it (Doug knows about this project). We had taken off the front and back covers and fan, in a cleanroom environment. We then used the CCDOps program to take a test image, which was satisfactory (no optics, so just hot pixels and smearing, but that's all we needed to make sure it was working). We put the camera's covers and fan back on and transported it home in its SBIG clamshell foam case.

Now 2 weeks later, we find that when trying to take a dark or light image, the image pixels all have a value of 0. We are using the USB connection. The shutter moves as expected. The camera has a good data link to the computer, because CCDOps reads the camera model information accurately. I can manually control the fan speed from CCDOps and hear the fan speed up and slow down. So the camera seems to be functioning normally, just no image.

We tested it on the computer that took the original satisfactory image, but that computer also only gets 0s now. The CCDOps is running version 5.66 Build 1-NT. It is a brand-new install of the drivers and software. The SBIGDriverChecker64 shows that the drivers are current. The firmware stxga.bf2 is at version 2.42 instead of 2.54; all other firmware is current. No firmware update was done between the "good" image and the "0" images. Another user on these forums (https://forum.diffractionlimited.com/threads/all-0-images-on-stxl-6303e.4869/) had a similar problem (I've PM'd that user).

Any ideas? Is a firmware update likely to solve this, or are we looking at a repair/replacement before we even get the project going?