I’m wondering about a behaviour for unsafe situations: when unsafe is detected by the safety monitor, SGP parks the telescope, closes the roof, and warms up the camera, as if unsafe required running an end of sequence.
But unsafe isn’t an end of sequence. It’s a temporary shutdown due to some event, with a view to continue later when the conditions become normal again.
I’m asking because for those who cool down and warm up their camera from high temperatures (e.g. 30C degrees ambient, -15C camera), it can involve a very long time. In my case a warm up followed by a cool down is over 1.5 hour.
Shouldn’t that behaviour be changed to make more sense?
I also noticed that during the restart period, while the camera is cooling down, the meridian flip isn’t performed. Which is very dangerous.
Hi @cedric
I believe somewhere in the SGP development plan is an item to expand the control of functions related to safety events. Although I can’t seem to find the forum discussion on it at the moment. Something along the lines of letting the user define which actions would and would not take place in the event of a “safety” condition.
It’s something I have an interest in - for example so that I can enable flats events to happen (at end of an imaging night), if there is a safety event (daylight has ended the imaging session).
I think the whole unsafe restart needs to be revisited. Another problem I noticed is that when it restart after conditions are safe again, SGP starts to cool down the camera and moves the telescope into position. But when it takes a long time to cool down, you can end up in the situation where the telescope hits the pier because SGP doesn’t do the flip as it’s waiting for the camera to be ready. This is really dangerous.
The restart sequence should be the same as with the main sequence: wait until the camera is nearly at temperature, THEN move the mount into position. That or do the flip.
We intend on providing additional control over both the things that are run during an unsafe shutdown and also the things that are run on a safe re-start.
Fully agree. This was also suggested earlier this year in this post: SGPro 4.4 Backlog - Our Thoughts and Request for Community Input - #55 by Ventania, where it got this reply from Ken “This is true and is a thing that has long been on our backlog to provide additional control over. It’s not a small task though and it won’t be present in the 4.5 maintenance release (a collection of smaller things), but we can definitely look at refactoring end of sequence actions afterward.”
SGP 4.5 is turning out to be much more than a maintenance release given all the UI changes. Would be good to see this issue addressed then in a next release as it is really a bit of pain on nights with passing clouds.