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Brian Valente: Absolutely. Give me a bit. I'll just post a link here when I have it ready. I want to put in a few annotations to make it a bit easier to follow |
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Okay @vikas chander @Brian Valente, here's the current sequence I'm using: Cosmic Bat and Crescent sequence To make any sense of this, you need to install these three plugins: 1. Sequencer Powerups (SP) - This is the most important one 2. Ground Station - I make very extensive use of the "Send to Pushover" instruction to send status messages to my phone and iPad. That way, I can really piss my wife off when we're out to dinner and I'm fussing with my telescopes  3. Connector - This just enables automated connecting and disconnecting to all my gear so I don't have to do that manually every night I don't really use any other plugins that show up in the sequence. Since I have 10Micron mounts, the 10Micron plugin looked promising. But I really haven't found much use for it. I use Model Creator to make models, and I only do that about once a year, if that. Someday I may use the Target Planning plugin, but I kind of enjoy doing that by hand right now, so I haven't looked into it much. I do use Hocus Focus, but it doesn't have any sequencer instructions. I'm sure there are many others that might be useful, but I haven't yet had a felt need. The SP plugin just rocks. If not for that, I would probably have been forced to move to Voyager. The main instructions I use from it are: 1. When Becomes Unsafe - This is the one that keeps me from taking a ton of ultra-high-resolution long exposures of the inside of the observatory roof 2. DIY Trigger - I used this to trigger an autofocus when the HFR increases by more than 8%. The reason I use the DIY Trigger instead of just the stock autofocus trigger is that it allows me to send a message to my phone via Pushover when an autofocus occurs -- usually right as the meal arrives 3. DIY Meridian Flip - Same thing. This allows me to send a Pushover message when the meridian flip happens 4. Variables - At the end of every loop execution, I increment an iteration count 5. Send via Ground Station - This allows me to pass variables and other information into a formatted message to send to my phone via Pushover, like the aforementioned iteration count, the current FWHM I'm getting, and the eccentricity I'm getting Also note that for each target, I have an outer loop and an inner loop. The outer loop is just set to execute once. The inner loop is where the meat is. Ron Brecher showed me this trick. If I just need to take 20 60s exposures each for R, G, and B for stars for a narrowband image, I can insert three Smart Exposure instructions to do that just before the inner loop. Anyway, I hope this is helpful. Let me know if you have any questions. Clear skies! Tim |
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nice, thanks Tim. UPDATE: Variables passed to discord message don't appear to work  I especially appreciate the template for passing variables to pushover, hoping those work in discord plugin as well Brian |
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Brian Valente: Oh man. That's too bad. Pushover is just a $5 one-time charge if you want to switch. But I can definitely see why you'd want to have this happen in Discord. Speaking of Discord, get on the NINA forum and ask Marc if he can add this functionality. He's usually extremely responsive and quick to make changes. By the way, please note that I'm still working on the "Initial Safety Check" block of instructions. That is there to solve an issue I was having when the observatory never opens during the night--like, as luck would have it, last night. The issue I'm trying to solve is this: If the observatory is still closed when Nautical Dusk arrives, the target sequence starts running. This immediately triggers "When Becomes Unsafe." That in itself is not a big deal, but then when the roof does open, it executes the "Once Safe" instructions, which opens the cover, slews to and centers the target, performs an autofocus, and starts guiding. As soon as that's complete, it drops down into the initial instruction set for the target, which the reslews to the target, performs an autofocus, and starts guiding--again. It's not a huge issue, just a waste of good imaging time. Originally, I put a "Wait Until Safe" instruction in the startup instructions. That works great unless the observatory never opens during the night. Then it just sits there until I get up and take a look. Then I have to manually warm the camera and shut everything down. So yesterday, I added this block of instructions just below the startup instructions:  That almost worked--except then it jumped right into the instructions for my first target, which immediately triggered a "When Becomes Unsafe" condition. That's where it stayed until I got up this morning. That first set of instructions was waiting until the roof opens tonight. So timing is a big consideration in all this. I've now added yet another block of instructions below that to try to handle the condition where the roof never opens and cause a graceful shutdown right at Nautical Dawn. I'm actually hoping NOT to test this very thoroughly for the next few nights because I'm hoping the roof will be open at dusk. But we'll see what happens on the next cloudy night and I'll report back here. If it works, I'll post an updated sequence. Here's everything I'm trying to use to handle this:  |
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| @Timothy Martin >>> Pushover is just a $5 one-time charge if you want to switch. Totally agree - I already have and use pushover, it's totally worth the $$. I use both pushover and discord, but i've been more moving to discord because a) I can see a complete transcript and easily scroll through the various posted messages, b) i can have a separate channel for each of the scopes (i have added 3 separate ones so far), and c) discord can post a preview image of each sub Regarding the added safety check loops, I open/close my own roof and have to park the scopes in a specific position before being able to close the roof, so i am doing it a little differently. I have the safety monitor determine when it's safe to open (or unsafe=close) roof, then the roof status is monitored separately via shutter status. |
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Brian Valente: Okay, that sounds damn cool. I'm going to have to look into it. |
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Brian Valente: That's cool. So some of this may not be relevant to you at all. I have zero control over the roof at Deep Sky West. I suppose I could call Lloyd at 10:30pm and rag on him about it, but he probably wouldn't much appreciate that! |
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Timothy Martin:Brian Valente: I'm guessing he would not  However, having someone else manage the roof and not worrying about park position is so much easier, i'm enviousBrian |
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Here’s a better sequence for you guys to look at. There were a number of bugs in the Sequencer Powerups plugin that were causing some of the Pushover messages to fail. I’ve been working directly with the developer, Marc Blank, on getting those fixed over the last week. He also helped me with the logic for two thorny problems I was still sometimes having in edge cases. The first problem concerned the situation where the roof stayed closed all night. Often times, we get a forecast that says conditions will clear during the night, and sometimes it’s wrong. I had a “Wait Until Safe” instruction at the top of the sequence that would just hang there all night. Then when I got up in the morning, I would have to manually terminate the sequence, warm the camera, and disconnect all the devices. Marc informed me that this instruction was unnecessary because the “When Becomes Unsafe" instruction would immediately trigger on the first target. When one of the loop conditions for that target turns FALSE and the sequence proceeds to the next target, of conditions are still unsafe, the WBU trigger will fire on the next target, and so on until finally, at the end of the night, the shutdown instructions will execute. I’ve tested this pretty thoroughly (too thoroughly, in fact, since the roof hasn’t been open much over the last week) and it works well. The second problem concerned what would happen if the roof was closed when the sequencer got to a new target. As I mentioned above, the WBU instruction would properly trigger, waiting for the roof to open. If the roof then opened while that target was still available, the sequencer would then execute the “Once Safe” block of instructions to open the cover, unpark the mount, slew to the target, and do an autofocus run. That’s fine, except it would then drop down into the target startup instructions and reslew to the target and do another autofocus run. Not a showstopper, but it does waste precious imaging time. So Marc suggested that I put a variable called TargetStartupComplete at the top of the target’s instructions and give it an initial value of FALSE. Then he suggested setting the variable to TRUE once the normal startup instructions for the target were completed. Finally, inside the “Once Safe” block of instructions, instead of blindly executing the open cover, unpark, slew, and autofocus instructions, there’s an If test that only allows execution of all that when TargetStartupComplete is TRUE. That prevents those instructions from every being executed twice unnecessarily. So I think what I have here is a sequence structure that will function efficiently and reliably and account for all the possible circumstances of roof openings and closures during the night. ADF & Crescent |
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Brian Valente: Hello, could you explain how send a preview of each sub? In the discord plugin there is only text messages. Thanks. |
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Hi Guys, Am very interested in this discussion since I have ACP and am having some issues with some of the software required for ACP and have taken a good look at NINA to troubleshoot some of my issues. I see the development of these sequences has matured and would be very interested is seeing a good model that would integrate the ROR, a weather safe condition and a mount park. I tried to do this with nested loops a couple years ago and gave up. CS Jerry Y PS Downloaded the ADF & Crescent.json and uploaded it into NINA. If this is the best model, will look to understand and modify it. Lot better than what I had done. I have a Piertech ROR and SkyAlert weather. They both show up nicely in NINA. |
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Jerry Yesavage: There's more developed example linked to in the description of the talk I gave on TAIC a couple of weeks ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgsRkwz-7ZM |
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Thanks, will look at the video. The logic of the programming seems pretty clear for me to tweak but I seem to be doing something basic wrong because I get this errors in red. I am not an expert at all in NINA, but I have a good observatory for testing such stuff.  |
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You need to have the following plugins installed: 1. Connector 2. Ground Station 3. Phd2 Tools 4. Sequencer Powerups And you need to have the latest versions of those plugins installed. |
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Hi, I have all the latest versions installed. Looks like this sequencer needs to have your variables defined somewhere.  I watched this video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgsRkwz-7ZM The code I wrote a year ago loads OK but not this. FYI, I see in the video Molly mentioned ACP, which I have, but am interested in seeing if I can do better on a few items using NINA. This, however, looks like a heavy reprogramming every time to change targets. ACP allows you to enter targets and move on in at most a minute a target, but you do have to like their approach as little is modifiable like on the roof. |
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Jerry Yesavage: The instructions that are giving you errors above are all Send to Pushover instructions which use the Ground Station plugin. You seem to have that installed, so I'm at a loss as to why you're getting these errors. It may be that you have to have the user and app keys defined for Pushover before it will recognize the instructions. In any case, those instructions have nothing to do with the roof logic. And I know nothing about how ACP works, so I can't help you there. As for updating targets, I just go to Framing Assistant in NINA and then click the Update Target button. It's pretty easy. But I will say that while I understand what ACP is used for, I'm not there yet. I still like to plan my nights on a daily basis. I may get weary of that and move to the NINA Target Scheduler at some point. I don't know whether it does all the things ACP can do, but it sure is a lot cheaper. |
