Problems of 3/26/2012

It has been a productive month. We are now at a point where the telescope systems are all working together. From this point on (unless something breaks) we should be able to perform observation tests and see how it all works together. The only hard part we are still having is pointing the telescope. Sometimes it seems to have a mind of its own.

Software

• Focus driver needs a little tweaking and testing - DONE
  
• Add user friendly GUI to control primitive features of the system - Website in progress - PARTIALLY COMPLETE
• TESTING and LOADS of it
• Nagios setup to point to new devices- BORAT online, other devices still need work
• Udev rules added to BORAT - DONE
  

Hardware

• Motion sensor wiring done, just need to connect each sensor via breadboard/connectors
• Weather sensor needs calibration
• New cable end for dome control cable - DONE
• Dome driver updated for new protocol - DONE
  
• Fan controller and Focuser in single box with single power supply - Waiting for shipment
  
• Cable rewire/Cable management, hellish mess right now - DONE
  

Security

• ZM also needs to be finished setting up - DONE
  
• ZM notification needs to be solved - DONE
  
• Motion detectors need to be wired in and fully tested
• Need some minor integration with IR+ZM+Lights work in combination
• Motion detection system needs some arduino code - DONE
  

Internet Speeds

We finally got around to gathering some ping information. This is important because we do want to control the telescope remotely and not just autonomously. So we would like to have low pings times as we gain other benefits too.


FYI the pings drops off at the end because the ping test server was off for a period of time.

First light....

Last Monday we finally got first images running through RTS2. The only missing part of the image acquisition is automatic focusing. Focuser still needs testing which we will probably get to end of this week.

Our Proof

Though this is quite a milestone there is still loads of work left to do. There are several software pieces that need work before BORAT can really achieve a primitive autonomous state.

Flood Lights

So far the surveillance/security system is coming along smoothly. We finished setting up a Bluecherry BC-H16480A capture card (16 ports!) and hooked up the flood lights. They're impressively bright and can be toggled with the web switch (I need to buy one of these for home).

Now, we just need to finish writing the Arduino driver to talk to RTS2 and hook it all up to the main building's security system. We need to figure out the logic and what constitutes an alarm or just a warning, as well as calibrate the PIR sensors.

Here's a pano view of the new floodlights:

Lee was moving around, but it still turned out OK

Dome in Motion

Lee closes up the dome after we finished some testing.

Problems of 2/2/2012

Newest addition is the new server is in place. Now we have plenty of horse power, disk, and redundancy to keep things rolling. With the new server in place attention can be focused to ZoneMinder and actually working with it with out worrying the compute might hard lock.

Software

• Focus driver needs a little tweaking and testing - READY FOR PHYSICAL TEST
  
• Add user friendly GUI to control primitive features of the system - Website in progress - PARTIALLY COMPLETE
• TESTING and LOADS of it
• Nagios setup to point to new devices- BORAT online, other devices still need work
• Udev rules added to BORAT
  

Hardware

• Motion sensor wiring done, just need to connect each sensor via breadboard/connectors
• Weather sensor needs calibration
• New cable end for dome control cable
• Fan controller and Focuser in single box with single power supply
• Cable rewire/Cable management, hellish mess right now
  

Security

• ZM also needs to be finished setting up - IN PROGRESS
  
• ZM notification needs to be solved - Have a plan (stmp-cli for emal notifications)
  
• Motion detectors need to be wired in and fully tested
• Need some minor integration with IR+ZM+Lights work in combination
• Motion detection system needs some arduino code

Problems of 1/4/2012

With the new year here it is time for BORAT to be on the fast track to first light. The history of the "Things To Do" list is something fixed, another item comes up. Same is true with this list, some of our original driver code giving us troubles.

Soon will have pics up of electrical and maybe inside of dome with final equipment.

Software

• AstroHaven dome driver needs update to stop spamming error messages and to add feedback from new dome control hardware - Currently Rewriting
  
• Add user friendly GUI to control primitive features of the system - Website in progress
• Current SVN RTS2 won't compile with our drivers - DONE
  

Hardware

• Repair crack on AstroHaven Dome - Still don't know what to do...??...
  
• Add lens heater on LX200GPS to reduce night dew. - Held off till summer
  
• Focuser rewire - DONE
  

Security

• Dome lights need work - DONE
  
• All external wiring needs to be finished - DONE
  
• ZM notification needs to be solved