Using a Hitec Astro Weather Deluxe weather station

[old_eyes]

A simple question to other users of the Hitec Astro Weather Deluxe.

I want to close the observatory roof when the weather station reports UNSAFE (clouds or rain), but I want to wait for 5 mins of SAFE before opening up and restarting the sequence. 

I know that the ASCOM drivers for some weather stations allow you to set such delays, but if the Hitec does I can't find it in the manual. I am using Voyager for observatory control and it recognises weather data from AAG or Boltwood, but not from Hitec. So I am using the Safety Monitor facility. This can delay before responding to a change in conditions, but it is symmetrical. The same delay moving from SAFE to UNSAFE as from UNSAFE to SAFE. So a risk of 5 mins rain before the roof closes. 

I have a backup rain sensor I can use for a quicker response, but I just wondered if I am missing something obvious?

[alan4908]

On 12/04/2021 at 19:49, old_eyes said:

A simple question to other users of the Hitec Astro Weather Deluxe.

I want to close the observatory roof when the weather station reports UNSAFE (clouds or rain), but I want to wait for 5 mins of SAFE before opening up and restarting the sequence. 

I know that the ASCOM drivers for some weather stations allow you to set such delays, but if the Hitec does I can't find it in the manual. I am using Voyager for observatory control and it recognises weather data from AAG or Boltwood, but not from Hitec. So I am using the Safety Monitor facility. This can delay before responding to a change in conditions, but it is symmetrical. The same delay moving from SAFE to UNSAFE as from UNSAFE to SAFE. So a risk of 5 mins rain before the roof closes. 

I have a backup rain sensor I can use for a quicker response, but I just wondered if I am missing something obvious?

I also have the same weather sensor but use it in conjunction with ACP Expert.  The Hitec Astro Weather has  an ASCOM weather service object ID with the name HitecWeather.Weather  - in order to set this up in ACP you simply tell it the ASCOM ID of the weather server and it then knows the state of the weather (Safe or Unsafe).  Although I'm not familiar with Voyager, I'd have thought you be able to perform a similar set up.   

FYI - given the variability of the UK weather I use 20 mins before starting things again. 

Alan

 

[old_eyes]

Thanks Alan.

I am using the Ascom safe/unsafe flag to control the observatory. The software suspends operations when unsafe is detected, and resumes on safe. So far it has worked well, but I have not yet experienced rain. What I would like to do is suspend immediately on rain and then wait until conditions are safe for 10 mins before resuming. Voyager supports all the outputs from AAG and Boltwood weather stations, and so can provide that service. Unfortunately not for Hitec Astro systems.

The data is there ( the Hitec software displays all the information), maybe I need to find out how to read it into Voyager.

[skybadger]

Voyager will also monitor a safe file, so if you can write something to monitor the weather station and apply some logic as to when you're prepared to write 'safe' to the file, it's workable.