I have found that by everyday starting the rotator fresh (a web switch turns off both it's 12V for motor and also the powered usb hub it's connected through).. it is very robust!! I have had now several completely unattended day/night ACP imaging sessions with occasional cloud closures with complete success. Leaving the rotator on all the time it is very unlikely to have 3 good nights in a row.
The shutter firmware (0.5.3.2) has a major limitation.. Say it is closed and closed switch knows about it. If the battery is unplugged so the shutter Arduino also goes off there is a problem. When the battery is reconnected after the shutter boots up it is not accessible until the rocker switch is used to open a crack then close. After that it is ready to go.
If the shutter firmware initialized to recognized "closed" when at switch some really simple like a $12 digital chicken coop timer could be setup so that the shutter also starts fresh each day! I can imagine setting such a timer for turning it off at ~10am and back on again ~4pm..
IMHO this is a major bug we need to address because it would remove a significant limitation and also greatly improve overall robustness plus save needless hours of on-time with the shutter arduino. The rotator is quite happy and ready to go on restart and the shutter should be as well.
Ron
The critical shutter has some firmware to read on this it will able to provide some data that was good to get on it. I have to read some data on this that have edubirdie.com review this used to get fiction that was about the beauty of this.
So if I add a line in setup (just before the loop) near line 113 in 0.5.3.2 PDMShutter.ino .. it compiles cleanly. Not sure when I can test as rain is pounding us again in Texas and I'm not going out to the Dome. If it does no harm and results in the shutter being ready to go without touching the switches I'm set..
void setup()
{
Computer.begin(9600);
Wireless.begin(9600);
updateInterval = 1000;
stepInterval = 100;
delay(10000);
Shutter.GetEndSwitchStatus();
}
Best,
Ron
Hey! If I were to just add GetEndSwitchStatus() somewhere in loop() think that would fix this? Or might it better be above in setup()?
Thanks in Advance,
Ron