I am shooting mainly from my back garden so I control via my home network while sitting in the warm...or sleeping.

I've had one or two issues with meridian flips that might be user error....or not. Multiple things like cables, re-centering, re-starting guiding, re-focusing and re-starting shooting etc.

In the colder months coming up, I'd love to receive a reminder from EKOS that a meridian flip is coming up in say 5 minutes or so - get an email, or even a bleeping alarm or screen flash on the monitoring PC. Just enough for me to get the big hat and coat on and oversee the flip in person.

Is this something that is already available, or has someone ever made a script to do this?

Thanks in advance

Good idea and definitely possible. I'll add an alert type for this in the next release.

The mount tab tells you how long to a flip, at least assuming the target doesn't change. Once the time hits 0, then when the current capture ends, the flip should begin.

Given that info, you should be able to set a rough alarm (again, for the current target).

Hy

Very true, and I do use it....and I could set an alarm on my phone, just thought an optional built-in alarm might be useful to us sleep deprived types......zzzzzzz

If possible it would also be useful to make sure that the session can start a script every time a merdian flip occurs successfully. For example I need to restart a device (telescope drive master) when the mount changes sides. Now I can do it using Kstars notifications, but it would be much more convenient to manage things of this type directly in Ekos. Now we can start scripts at the start and at the end of a sequence... we could add a tab that also starts scripts during the sequence when some actions occur, one of these could be the meridian flip, including an alert that warns that between minutes the flip will activate.

As Hy already said, if you have a single target in your session, you can set your old trusted alarm clock, according to this value.



It would be great if Jasem or another dev could improve/add etc. the notification system. My alternative approach at the moment is this: indilib.org/forum/ekos/11746-push-notifications.html

Pushover works pretty well as per Euripides instructions in the linked thread.

I used it until I had to pay!

It would be better if there was an open source alternative.

Its quite good for yes / no type events (MF started, MF finished, etc) but would need development to parameterise some events, e.g. Focus completed, HFR 1.5, R2=0.91. But then again maybe its better to KISS and remote in for more complex data.