Working with PHD Emailer

Hi Group,

If there are any PHD Emailer gurus out there, I would genuinely appreciate your help.
I’m currently running a wireless internet connection between my observatory and home computer. The Obs computer is a Dell Vista.
I’m able to communicate via email between the observatory’s computer and my home network (i.e. house computer, phone, ipad, etc).
But I am not able to communicate between the PHD Emailer and my observatory computer. When I attempt to send the “Test” message,

  1. The system attempts to connect, but eventually “times” out.
  2. The “message” window of the PHD Emailer continually reports “PHD Not Found”.
    My tests have been during the daylight with both SGPro and PHD Guide turned on.

This is a great concept, so I hope I can get it working. Any help you could lend would be appreciated.

Mark

PHDEmailer does see PHD1, but I’m having no luck with the “Test”. It still times out.

I’ve toyed with using some simple python scripts to parse out the PHD2 data and then issue a google voice sms but it’s still in the idea phases!

Mike

:thumbsdown: Don’t parse, use this instead: Google Code Archive - Long-term storage for Google Code Project Hosting.

Andy

1 Like

That’s exactly what I was looking at. If you open the tcp connection via telnet you will notice a stream of events incoming over time. I can’t think of a way to pick out the desired events other than to match keywords as they occur and base actions upon it. That’s what I meant by parsing.

Mike

Sorry, Mike. I misunderstood what you were saying. If you are using the event server interface, the monitoring should be very simple. The format of the data is JSON, and python has built-in JSON support, just import json and away you go.

Andy

PHDEmailer should work for PHD2. At least it was working a while back. It’s not using the new API as of yet though. It’s still doing the UI parsing that was done for PHD1 and that may have changed with more recent releases.

The 2.4 release of SGP will have a monitoring service that will actually roll the “star lost” (and many other) alerts into SGP.

Thanks,
Jared

Thanks Jared,

Will those new features in 2.4 then allow communication via email? That is where my interest lies.

Mark

Mark,
Yes, the alerts are configured for email. I prefer text alerts and my wireless carrier allows me to send an “email” to ???@vtext.com which then comes on my phone as a text. In this way I can configure the text on my phone to play a song to wake me up if I’m sleeping. An email would just make a “ding” and probably wouldn’t wake me up.

The notification system is great in 2.4 beta and allows for more flexibility as to the types of events that trigger a notification.

Thanks, looking forward to seeing it.

Clouds seem to be my biggest problem now that SGPro is hitting on all cylinders.

Mark

If you install python, I can help.
Right now my scripts just send notifications to the screen, but I did at one point have a script that would send a Google Voice SMS!

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/open-phd-guiding/FWn_LP-YObc

I hope to make it a bit more robust than it is now. Stay tuned!

Mike