Automatically loading Viking on Voyager connect

Hi all,

I did my first automatic session the other night, which I had viking and Voyager already open on my Observatory computer. Which worked perfectly I might add, kudos to the Voyager team. While testing some things during the day I closed down Viking, which controls the opening and closing of my roof via a K8055 board. When I tried a session lastnight, I couldn’t get the roof to open. Now the temperature inside the observatory had reached 45c so I had thought something went wrong due to the temperature. I tried several times to run the dragscript, which calls for the opening of the roof, but it wouldn’t. Luckily I can slew my telescope around inside the observatory with the roof closed. I put it down to equipment failure so I decided to shut down the Observatory computer (which cannot be restarted without me doing it manually) just incase something happened at the roof remained open. I might add the Observatory is 120km away in a dark sky location.

After closing down the computer it dawned on me that I hadn’t restarted Viking so Voyager wasn’t aware Viking wasn’t there, so it sent the commands thinking they had been received and implemented. I was looking for an option inside voyager to automatically start viking on connection to the setup but couldn’t find the option. Is it there? The only option I did find was using Viking Observing conditions, is this the same thing, but doesn’t actually open the windows application but still controls the K8055 board? I’m a little confused, if it does, what if I wanted to use an ASCOM based Observing conditions monitor, I wouldn’t be able to use viking then.

Some help needed trying to understand this. Thanks in advance.

Andrew
South Australia

Hi Andrew,

to start Viking with voyager use the flag Viking Server is on this Machine:


ASCOM observing condition is for other things, environment data.

When you sent a command with DragScript check the return of action with the IF action result if this is a critical/important task:

All the best
Leonardo

Ahh thanks Leo, it seems I missed that first step on the setup. I will adjust my dragscript with the IF action also. Many thanks.