This is fantastic work. My Dragscript is 570 lines in length. It used to take a couple of minutes to load in then another minute to start. It’s all done in under 30 seconds now. That is a huge performance improvement. Well done and thank you.
570 lines is really huge ! Next step we will introduce DragScript Self Contained block (like we do now for array version). This is a subroutine call that execute an external dragscript inside the main one with input and output parameters.
This is exactly what I could do with. Yes it’s a big dragscript and I’ve cut it down as much as possible. It handles everything from choice of profile, whether to wait for astronomical or nautical night, to flats, connection, autofocus, mount modelling and sequences. It’s made longer because it caters for 3 OTA combinations.
Anyway, thanks for the heads up on the external dragscript feature. It’s much needed.
In case anyone misreads that last post about the signalling, it was not any form of critique - i was just helping Tom complete a bit more his comprehensive list of Voyager capabilities…!
and just in case anyone is reading this while doing research on what voyager can do, I currently have a single script that is being deployed in several sites that can handle:
2 OTAs on same mount
4 image trains on a single OTA via profiles that can be changed within scripts (one setup has 11 cameras including various off axis guiders for the image trains - all selectable by voyager control of phd profiles)
Viking management of Pegasus and Dragonfly boxes (am about to extend this to Talon roof control too)
image acquisition direct to camera drivers and via maxim
comprehensive signalling via telegram, sms and email (some overkill there I will admit)
…as well as the usual voyager management as flagged by Tom of guiding/focus/flats/auto calibration frames/ weather events…
It starts getting very complicated. I started with 3 scripts for the 3 OTAs, and 3 scripts for each imaging start constraints (nautical, astro, no wait). 9 scripts which was fine but then when I changed one I had to change all the others.
So… one very large script to cater for them all. I just need to handle the hang up/stall events that seems to happen with the other automated programs that have hiccups thanks to Windows being such a stable OS after it updates…
Wow! Mine’s “only” 209 and that’s with a minimal amount of commenting and signalling and it still could use some work to add better control over decisions like target seleciton and whether or not to run Dawn or Dusk flats, etc Right now I use embedded varaibles but have bene thinking about using a call out to a script that returns a value so that I can leave teh DragScript running perpetually and simply update the mission paramters for the day/night.
Having siad that, the new Advanced module looks like it will inlcude a lot of these features, meaning my DragScript can become simpler! So exciting!