Anyone built a safety ascom driver ?

[skybadger]

Hi all 

I'm prepping to write my own ascom safety driver , principally driven by weather conditions with some dome signals included. It's generally used to interrupt a dome observing session and close up if necessary, say due to some device failing or it starting to rain. Anyone done this already ? I'm interested in your logic approach and what you thought was important. 

I'll be using node red to host the driver in alpaca , that bit is already done actually. So I just need to work out a robust approach to combining the inputs to make a sensible output. 

My inputs consist of weather sensors like a Sqm, all sky camera, sky temp sensor, rain and wind sensor, device connection  probes, power sensors etc and there is clearly a dependency on day/night, automated operation or manned and what is advisory and what you might consider mandatory. 

The output is a single binary isSafe = yes or no. 

What are your thoughts ? 

 

 

 

[inFINNity Deck]

Hi SkyBadger (is that your real name?;-))

I have written several ASCOM safety drivers, which all can be found on my website:

http://www.dehilster.info/astronomy/astro-software.php

and on the ASCOM site (but that links to my site):

https://ascom-standards.org/Downloads/SafetyMonitorDrivers.htm

An environmental SafetyMonitor is one of them.

Nicolàs

 

[skybadger]

Hi Nicolas. 

The driver isn't the problem. You seem to have written yours to let the user set their criteria.  I'm asking what logic people have used to collect and set  their criteria. Some of the logic isn't obvious. For example, at my location , the southwestern wind means that if the sky temp is below 0 it's definitely clear, but below 8 and it it still might be clear. If it's raining is fairly straightforward but I might require it to be both night and above 0 and cloud cover >80% before I abort an observing g run by going to 'not safe'.