Quote:
Originally Posted by Geoff45
That’s a very nice rendition M&T. Nice colours and pinpoint stars. Congratulations on the remote advance.
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Thanks muchly, Geoff.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Imme
Great pic guys.
I recently went remote control from the house as well and I feel your joy......best thing I’ve found with it is the ability to roll over in bed at 3am, close down the imaging run, equipment and computer then roll back over and go to sleep without having to get out of bed.
Definately get the wake on LAN thing happening....really makes life easy. I use TeamViewer to switch the remote computer on then switch over to Microsoft Remote Desktop so I’m not chewing through the data on my limited plan
How are you controlling power? I’ve grabbed a USB 8 x relay board which works an absolute treat......switches everything on/off and even closes my roof. I just had to make/wire a control box up. It gives me 4 x 240v double gpo’s and 4 x 12v circuits that can be independently controlled.
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Hi, Jon,
At present we run off a Honda EU30iS generator with a 2-wire remote start/stop. I designed and built the microcontroller boards that work the scope and all the observatory control software. I've included a scripting facility where we can select multiple targets, filter changes, exposures, etc.
A few typical lines might be:
Open dome
Start cameras
Synch to Alphard
Goto M83
Filter cycle RGB
Shoot M83 12 prefocus shots 30 min unbinned
Goto Trifid
Filter cycle Ha
Shoot Trifid 3 prefocus shots 60 min unbinned
The "shoot" line manages changing filters and refocus between frames.
The last 3 scripting lines are almost always:
Park
Close dome
Shut down Windows and kill generator
The Kill Generator part is done using a solid state relay with 6000 volts of isolation at the observatory end, and a self-latching relay at the generator end.
Instantly on executing that last line, the microcontroller is on it's own, running off the UPS. It waits 30 seconds to allow Windows to complete shutdown and for the generator to stop. It's last (necessarily suicidal) act is to shut down the UPS.
This all happens while we sleep on obliviously.
Now that we've got the wireless bridge, we use Windows Remote Desktop back at the house to write the script on the observatory machine. Thereafter, everything happens as usual, with the advantage that we can see what is happening, and the additional step that when the UPS powers down, the link to the house is lost and the virtual desktop shuts down.
Once we have solar, the plan is to have the last line of the script tell the observatory computer to hibernate, rather than shut down completely. The generator will be transparently controlled by the solar battery controller, not by me.
Although I've been writing (mostly medical/scientific) real time and embedded device control software for almost 40 years, I'm getting out of touch and the wireless and ethernet parts are very new to me, to the point of bewilderment, so I'm going to have to ask for a lot of help from obliging mates who like that sort of thing and don't mind my cooking
Trish is helping with moral support and logistics.
Very best,
Mike