So the other day while browsing through settings, I made the mistake of setting the “Number of events for new targets.” from one to 100, thinking that it was referring to the repeat count, not the event count. The end result was that the next time I started SGP a day or two later, it took about twenty minutes to come up, as it attempted to build a sequence with 100 items and apparently became exponentially slower as it went. That begs a whole set of questions as to why it takes so long for SGP to add events to a sequence and if something like this is that slow so that it’s not really viable, why is it even allowed, or at least not warned with “do you really want to do this?” On the other end is that when SGP started, there was no way to abort the sequence generation process and no obvious way to edit the preference outside SGP, so I had no choice but to wait until it finally managed to finish building it so I could go back and change the setting. On a related note, it would be really nice if there was an option to start SGP with either the last saved sequence or none at all. This automatic creation of a blank sequence is really not particularly useful, and actually is an annoyance if I happen to start the equipment before loading the profile I want to run, etc. Then I get warnings about the camera cooldown sequence, etc. being tied to the blank sequence and being aborted if I stop and do I want to save a blank sequence, etc.! Not sure how others feel, but it seems likely that creating a new blank sequence is one of the least often operations when you start SGP, vs. continuing an existing sequence or editing one that you already have to change targets.
While I’m on the subject, perhaps I’ve just missed something as I haven’t gone looking for it, but is there not a way to automatically connect all equipment, unpark the scope, etc.? I always have to manually click all the buttons which seems somewhat pointless for an automated system. Even PHD2 has a “connect all” button!
Note, I did just find the menu option for connecting all equipment, but not having tested it, I’m not sure it handles unparking. Seems like there should be a “connect all at start” option in the sequence just like there’s a “disconnect all at end” option.
It’s possible I am mis-construing the request, but here is my technique (Win 10) …
The SGPro startup icon resides on the task bar.
I right click the icon and a list of recently used sequences comes up.
The most recent is at the top of the list.
Left click on the top item and you’re there.
Unless my mind is on Pluto (and I inadvertently left click the icon), I never start up with a blank sequence.
Hope this helps, and appreciate any comments on what I’m missing if it doesn’t.
Since this all runs from a dedicated laptop in my observatory, I have all the programs I use pinned to the taskbar and just click on each one to start it. Mark (niteman)'s suggestion would work from there if I could train myself to right-click SGP instead of left clicking like everything else. The option to do a command line load is there, but it still requires special handling. Generally I detest anything that requires additional steps/clicks when it really shouldn’t be necessary. In this case, the right click and load takes me from three clicks (left click start, file, load file from history) to two (right click, load file from history) so it’s an improvement, but only marginal (and easily forgotten).
I do agree with Joel that any feature change like this should be configured with an option, but frankly I’d just be happy with it NOT creating a blank sequence by default (open with no sequence) rather than being tempted to enable equipment and THEN load equipment. I’m not sure that’s compatible with the SGP architecture view, since although it’s designed around what looks like a doc/view type architecture, I suspect that the functionality is so heavily integrated to the “document” that not having a sequence open is an invalid state. That would be supported by the fact that there is no “close” option in the file menu, only open and save.
Nonetheless, for odd cases like the setting snafu that caused me to start this thread, being able to get to the menu BEFORE a sequence is created/loaded would be nice. My only option was to wait through the pain of building the 100 event file before I could fix the problem. That was made worse by killing the app once after waiting 5-10 minutes looking for another solution before finally just letting it go through the whole thing. Of course if I’d thought of Mark’s solution and just tried to load another file from the command line I could probably have bypassed the problem and fixed the setting!
You can also double click any Sequence File and that will open up SGP with that file.
However, next version of SGP3 will open the last sequence that was loaded. This is defaulted to “On” but can be turned off in the Options menu. When off it will open the default profile (current behavior).
