I’ve been noticing a little strangeness around the notification system. I have always had an email/text notification setup and the only option I currently have selected is “Alerts (the sequence will not continue until you do something)”. I didn’t change anything at all after installing .153 beta, and yet now I am getting a text alert every time a target successfully centers. I am at a loss for how to turn this off.
I would also like to add that IMHO there are way too many notifications popping up in the notification center.
I am finding a weirdness with the restart functionality. I started the sequence and it ran perfectly. Clouds appeared and conditions became Unsafe. The sequence stopped. It sat on the waiting for Safe to resume sequence screen. I decided to stop the sequence and pressed Pause Sequence. I didn’t see exactly what it did and in what order, but the net result was that it started the sequence and proceeded to open my observatory and slew to the target. This was not appropriate behaviour! I clicked Park as that was the only thing I could think of doing as the abort sequence button was greyed out. The observatory closed and the mount parked. Phew! Here is a link to the log file:
As I said, weirdness. Hopefully you can repeat this problem and work out what’s going on here that is wrong.
Normal, yes. Correct, probably not. I think if you’re in the “resume on safe” mode then SGP should just keep running but I haven’t added handling for end times yet. I’ll do that for the next beta.
Makes sense. I’ll make these changes for the next beta.
Yeah, that’s not right. I’ll check that behavior out.
Thanks for the responses Jared. Really liking the restart functionality and I’m delighted to be able to help out with beta testing. Keep up the good work and best wishes for 2019!
One thing I noted is that all of my setups (all of the equipment profiles) had reverted to “synch” instead of “Target Offset”. Easy enough to fix but resulted in a failed sequence the first time I ran the beta.
Hello. Another mixed session with the restart feature last night. Conditions were not ideal for imaging, but perfect for testing the restart functionality!
The first oddness was that the target was in the west, the mount slewed correctly, but when the auto centre routine started the mount slewed to the wrong side of the pier, then got it right and went to the correct side. Not sure what was going on there?
After a couple of successful exposures, conditions became Unsafe and the system shut down. It then went weird and continued to shut down multiple times over the next hour or so. Suffice to say that the system never properly went into ‘waiting to resume‘ mode and didnt restart despite conditions becoming safe again.
More strangeness to report… I set everything up for a sequence to start at 18:00:00 and left the machine. When I came back to it soon after 18:00, I found that it had shut down due to Unsafe and was not waiting to restart on Safe. I checked the log file and found this: “settingRestartAfterUnsafe = False”, so no wonder its not restarting after Unsafe! But why? I have ‘Tools / Options / Restart sequence when conditions are safe’ ticked, but it seems to be ignoring that. I have even reinstalled the beta software, but the problem persists. Strange…? Help please!
Strangeness update… things appear to be working normally for now. The system shutdown on Unsafe, then waited to restart on Safe and did restart on Safe. Excellent!
More data from last night’s restart session. After the target end time was reached and the system shut down, it continued to react to Unsafe conditions and try and shut down again, depsite everything being shut down already.
Thanks for all the reports @PhotoGav. I hope to have another beta out in the next couple of days to address the RBI flush and some of the strangeness around Restart.
Great news Jared, thank you, I look forward to the new release. It has been lucky that sky conditions have been intermittent just recently, perfect for testing the restart functionality!
With regards to the TEC warming / restart issue - having thought about it, my preferred approach is to leave the camera cooling on an unsafe shut down and only warm it up when the sequence ends because either: all events are complete or the sequence end time is reached or the sequence is ended manually. Are there any other complete end of sequence triggers? Would that be possible / easy to implement?
At the moment there isn’t another trigger for this. I’m still trying to determine how to fix it to be completely honest. I believe the easiest would be to allow the camera to warm up and suppress the warm up error message. Then when the sequence is safe that would kick off the cool down process. Downside to this is that you would have the 5 minute wait + the cool down period before SGP would swing back into action. But at least during the cool down SGP would be slewing to the target, getting the guider going and running auto focus, so not completely wasted time.
OK, stopping the error message would certainly stop the current issue.
Couple of thoughts: What happens if the sequence is stopped by Unsafe, the camera is warming up, conditions turn safe, the five minute wait finishes and the sequence restarts, while the camera is still warming up?
The other question is how to trigger a total end of sequence action when all events are complete or all target end times are passed or the sequence end time is passed? You say there isn’t anything at the moment. Are the Sequence Settings (right hand button below Target List box) carried out on an Unsafe event? If so, I guess something new needs to be added? If not, it might be possible to either add a Warm Up Camera option there or do it with a script in the ‘Run script at sequence end’ box?
I would also like to have an option to turn off the notifications of frames completed. The not so little windows can obscure much of the screen, especially when taking short exposures.
@jared
Hi, A couple of gremlins still in this beta - in the sequence window, the equipment profile name on an established sequence keeps flipping back to the default - but the actual profile is unaltered. I also note that this beta has reverted back to defaulting the Telescope sync option back to ‘sync’ on all equipment profiles and sequences. The prior beta honored the existing settings.
Had the first opportunity to try the resume feature - it worked a charm. This was at the very start of a sequence, where the rain sensor had dew on it. I cleaned the sensor and 5 mins later SGP started up just peachy, connecting the equipment, focusing, centering etc.
