Not sure if this has been posted before but I could not search this anywhere so if anyone know if this has been asked, please point me in the right direction. Thanks.
So I am running a remote observatory and recently, there are lots of power outage where the observatory is. I added a UPS to the system but the UPS capacity is limited so it'll not drive the whole observatory for several hours that typically needed on a remote session.
I am looking for a solution that will initiate the shutdown procedure ( parking of mount, telescope...) when there are a power outage.
Not sure if there is anyway to do this with INDI? I am thinking of having a weather station or something similiar hooked in front of the UPS and go out with the power outage. If the query to the weather station failed for a specific time, the observatory shutdown procedure kick in.
Anyone idea on this is welcomed. Thanks!
I would investigate using nut UPS software to monitor your UPS. Indi has a nut driver that can inform an unsafe condition to the Ekos system and trigger a shutdown script.
Your plan looks good. Maybe the Indi watchdog driver is able to trigger the observatory shutdown if the connection to the wheater station is lost, but not sure of that.
I a currently using something rather similar to your plan to shutdown my observatory is case of power outage. I use the indi wheater watcher driver in combination with my wheather station s (AAG Cloud whatcher and openwheather map). The principle of this driver is to read a text file where the wheather informations are written and you need to write your own script for that purpose. So, I wrote a script that periodicaly fetch the data from the wheater station a write it to the text file as required. But this same script also checks for the existance of a file named /etc/poweroutage (name it as you like) created by nut when a power outage event is happening (you need to confiure nut for that). If this file exists, the script just write that wheather is in danger zone whitch triggers the observatory shutdown.
Thanks Ed, i am not aware of the Indi-Nut driver. So I just need a NUT supported UPS, a webserver running NUT that plugged into the USB/RS232 of the UPS (thinking a Raspberry Pi) and I can use indi-nut to monitor the UPS status? That seems to be the way to go. Since I am having multiple imaging rigs running in the same observatory, having a standalone webserver that all the computer can look into and act acccordingly is a must.
Thanks a heap!
Thanks Sebasiten,
Thanks for your suggestion, but I think I'll explore the approach that Ed laid out above. Ed's approach seems to be more fool proof since it directly query the UPS which knows best of the power outage situation. But thanks and good luck on your project.