Automation monitoring webserver

[Euan]

Ok, the summer is here now so it's time to try and fix all the things that went wrong in the winter and try and get in some more crazy projects before the darkness returns... first up, a new web server that watches over the observatory

This idea is born out of a series of problems:

1. Redundancy I've always been worried about having one PC controlling all my gear, if the power trips and it rains, game over. I need a second system monitoring weather as well as the status of everything.

2. Weather Monitoring It would be great to get alerts if it becomes clear or cloudy, even if the obs is locked up and switched off.

3. Security I only have a camera in the obs, I would like to be able to keep an eye on it 24/7, including full IR nightvision.

4. Monitoring When the gear is running, and you are doing other things (like sleeping) it's difficult to get an overview of what is happening. I want to be able to get a summary of the whole system in a webpage that I can get on different devices around the house, to see what is happening at a glance.

What I have done so far is to install a PC in the house that runs a webpage split up into different frames. These show:

1. Internal camera

2. External camera

3. Sat24 live IR data

4. Obs device status and control

5. Weather monitoring

I've bought an (Aurora Cloud Sensor). This is connected to both the obs PC and the monitoring PC. There is also a backup rain sensor in case this one fails for any reason. The graph in the frame below is a mock-up as a web interface for it is not due until the next software release.

The one thing I would like to do is to get some real data from MaximDL onto the page, much like ACP does, but I'm still looking into how to do this.

So far it works really well, I can also make different pages for different devices depending on the resolution.

[yesyes]

How did you get the sat24 data? Do you just load their webpage into the frame?

I found an interface where you can grab just the satellite images. I have a project in the back of my head where I would periodically download the image (every 15 minutes) and store it with a time stamp. Then I could play back the animation for any time period I have data for. Problem is I don't know web programming...

[Euan]

Do you just load their webpage into the frame?

That's it exactly, although I need to figure out how to refresh it every 15 mins without it getting bumped to the top left hand side of the page without being focused over the UK.

[yesyes]

When you view their page source, you'll find this towards the beginning of the source:

var imageUrls = ["/image2.ashx?region=eu&time=201106252215&ir=true","/image2.ashx?region=eu&time=201106252200&ir=true",

You could use this to load the image only, just provide the correct time stamp...