I’m having a hard time not thinking the Control Panel is a confusing and pointless “feature”.
Until now, I was ok with it.
But here’s why I am posting this and maybe people can correct me if I’m wrong.
I always thought of Control Panel as a part of a sequence.
So for example, I created Equipment Profiles with most of the settings I could think of.
But when it came down to it I edited the Control Panel from time to time with the little things I needed for that sequence.
Perhaps with this focuser I wanted more steps, or if I needed to change the image scale.
And here is where my opinion went sideways and I no longer think the Control Panel makes any sense.
I needed to do flats. So I fire up the Flats Calibration Wizard, and establish the Equipment Profile to save the settings to. Not the Control Panel, but the Equipment Profile.
So I go through all the filters, LRGBHAO3S2 and I get all my exposure settings for flats done.
I go back and Apply the Equipment Profile to the sequence.
And did I just overwrite all my Control Panel, sequence specific settings with stale old Equipment Profile settings just so I could take flats with the saved flats exposure times? Yes I did.
I don’t think this should be allowed.
my .02
what do you say?
As opposed to what alternative? How are you proposing that SGPro present control of different aspects of the sequence?
It is
Sure… everybody does this, then, if the changes you made are permanent you save sequence as a profile. If not, those changes just live with that sequence.
Is this a statement or clarification or are you implying that you would prefer to make changes to the Control Panel / Sequence?
Here is where I get lost a little bit… I’m just uncertain of the confusion. If you changed your flats settings for a specific equipment profile and then applied that profile to a sequence, are you not expecting that the sequence will now reflect the settings in the newly modified equipment profile? Why would this not be allowed to happen?
Text is a difficult medium for some things… I’m absolutely not being defensive in any way, just trying to understand your intent here.
I totally appreciate the conversation and I apologize as my language may have come across as angry. Not at all.
If I modify equipment settings in control panel these modifications are unique to the sequence.
If I then modify an equipment profile with new flat exposure values, I can only utilize the flats setting if I apply the equipment profile to the sequence. This action overwrites control panel settings. It only takes one discrepancy to cause havoc. Why not have a single place for equipment settings? The control panel duplicates most if not all equipment settings. As it stands, i should really keep a spreadsheet of the settings in Equipment Manager and the ones in Control Panel so that they can go back to their control panel settings after applying an equipment manager settings to their sequence. Which defeats the purpose of SGP. Because that’s the only way I would remember how they were different. But there doesnt need to be two places to store these settings. If all we ever used was equipment manager, sequence settings would never be lost when applying equipment profiles.
As it stands for me now, I am thinking for my needs I will stop using control panel.
I will modify the equipment manager settings as needed, apply the profile to the sequence, and move on.
Control panel is functionally fine and maybe some people are ok with it.
But I prefer one set of equipment settings for myself.
As it seems this is my issue, lets move on. It’s not a complaint, it just seemed inefficient to me.
but here is a real world example.
Night one, new focuser.
I configure my equipment in the equipment manager and apply the profile to my sequence.
As I work out the correct number of steps I settle on a number and enter it in control panel.
From now on, auto focus runs like a charm.
Then I run flats wizard and get my flat exposure times saved to my equipment profile.
I apply the equipment profile.
Next night I go out, and run the seuence.
Autofocus isn’t working.
I check and of course, all the settings that I worked on for an hour the night before were overwritten when I applied the equipment profile with the flats exposure settings.
Solution?
Remember when you change anything on control panel to go to the relevant equipment profile and duplicate the edit there so you don’t lose it. Make sense? Or am I missing something?
thanks,
Malcolm
Oh, ok, the example was helpful. I understand your point (and frustration), but I still don’t comprehend a version of SGPro without the control panel.
I don’t see how it’s possible to not have a control panel, but I think what you are asking for is maybe some kind of “under the hood / invisible” profile that is updated whenever a sequence that uses that sequence updates it. At least in the example you added, it would have prevented that specific issue. It is a different profile model than SGPro uses, of course (SGPro chose the standard “MS Word” template model). It would be a pretty big change and I would argue that it would produce frustration in other places (i.e. unexpected changes in other sequences).
All that said, I may be able to offer you a different workflow that is more in line with how your brain is working here. Don’t use equipment profiles at all… just get rid of them. In addition to profiles, SGPro has the notion of a “Sequence Template”. Essentially, you only care about the Control Panel. Make changes, save the sequence, make changes, save the sequence. From time to time, where you would have used a profile before, you instead save the sequence as a template. This saves a .sgt file to disk and you can use it later to make a new sequence with and never run the risk of clobbering its settings by accidentally saving over it.
In the example you cited, the workflow would be (caps are my changes):
Night one, new focuser.
I configure my equipment in the CONTROL PANEL and SAVE my sequence.
As I work out the correct number of steps I settle on a number and enter it in control panel.
From now on, auto focus runs like a charm.
Then I run flats wizard and get my flat exposure times saved to my CURRENT SEQUENCE.
I SAVE THE SEQUENCE
I SAVE THE SEQUENCE AS A TEMPLATE (OPTIONALLY)
Next night I go out, and run the sequence.
Autofocus IS working BECAUSE YOU ONLY EVER WORKED WITH THE CONTROL PANEL.
YOUR FLATS SETTINGS ARE ALSO STILL INTACT
After this, future sequences can be created from this template and it also allows the sequence to be modified independent of any kind of profile.
Indeed. AutoFlats targets uniform ADU and not exposure length. That said, you can force AutoFlats to use a static time by setting the min and max exposure to the same value. Unfortunately, there isn’t a good way to transpose the times the wizard calculated into those 2 fields.
