My sequence aborted last night due to a lost guide star and SGP went through the end of sequence actions, parking the mount, closing the roof and disconnecting all the devices and those attached to PHD2.
It was a passing cloud and I manually opened the roof and hit resume in SGP a short while afterward. SGP connected all the direct equipment but it did not reconnect the devices back in PHD2. It also did not unpark the mount, slew or center again but immediately tried autofocusing on the observatory wall. I aborted again.
To get the system operating again, I had to manually connect all devices in SGP and PHD2, manually unpark, slew and center and then hit resume in SGP. (I also noticed that in my autofocus settings, although I do not have autofocus-on-resume enabled, it always autofocuses when I click the resume sequence button.)
It seems to me that in these conditions, it is unclear what is meant to happen. On the one hand, it would be great if SGP could entirely pick up from where it left off - just as it does when you run the sequence in the first place. On the other hand, it equally makes sense for SGP to decline a resume operation when the system has been aborted and the end of sequence options executed.
I feel that it has to be one of the other, at present the logic falls over.
I have felt for a while that the SGP “Sequence” dialog box needs a button to actually terminate the current sequence; that is, not Pause and then Resume at some later time. I want to hit Cancel or Stop and have SGP present an option dialog box to let me Abort Current Image, Save the Sequence; Run End of Sequence, etc. The Sequence should be saved and then reloaded. Now it is exactly the same as if I had just started the sequence for the first time.
Several times when I have tried to Pause and Resume, something gets out of sequence or fails to happen and I end up closing SGP entirely and restarting from scratch.
Right now, I do not use the Recovery Option. Just let SGP fail, send me an email and then I restart everything from scratch.
The concept of Recovery is a good one but what happens when a recovery is performed needs to be more complex with each event in the series of events being enabled or disabled by the user.
I found that instead of closing down SGP you can reset the sequence.
In my opinion there should be an option to automatically reset the sequence after a sequence is stopped.
I also wish SGP would be able to use the safety monitor to start/stop by itself and run through the whole night without interaction from the user, right now if UNSAFE is triggered it won’t start up again by itself if it becomes safe again.
I think there is a common sentiment here that it would be great if a recovery option could robustly restart a sequence just as effortlessly as it is to run one in the beginning. That would require checking the status of device connectivity, mount and guiding status beforehand, which is not difficult to do within ASCOM. With that in place, the next layer would be to evaluate if, just as SGP can shut down in unsafe conditions, if it could start back up again if those conditions abated.
Personally, I think this is of more value and within the gamut of SGP’s purpose than digressing into polar alignment etc. at this time?
I completely agree with all f this. I am using and appreciating SGP for the automation functionality and I think that improvements on this side are really necessary.
