I'm about to get my observatory in operation and I'm looking at the weather safety drivers. I have a system to monitor clouds (all sky camera), so I know if it is clear or cloudy. I would like to observatory to automatically shut down when the clouds come in and possible automatically open again if they should disappear.
Will the 'Weather Safety Proxy' or 'WeatherWatcher' drivers let me do this? And which is the best of the two?
If not, what is the recommended driver for weather watching?
If you have your own device that can monitor clouds and rain then you can write an indi weather driver for it.
I did this for my own home-made cloud and rain monitor device -> github.com/dokeeffe/cloud-rain-monitor
If you have an off the shelf weather device then there may already be an INDI 3rd party driver available.
And as Jasem says, the EKOS observatory tab will talk to this driver and do stuff for you (like closing the roof etc)
Also the EKOS scheduler monitors the weather through your driver during a schedule and can perform a shutdown procedure.
If I can get one of the two drivers I mention to work with my weather system, is there then a reason to write a new driver? Or will these not work with ekos 'observatory tab'?
They basically monitor a file or use a small script to get data if it is clear or not and I can easily work with that....
AH yes of course, no need to write a driver if you can get one of the existing working. I was not aware of the 'Weather Safety Proxy' driver. It actually looks really good. I think you can configure it with a script to interact with your custom device. Thats the way to go. Less code the better. Actually now it gives me the idea to use it instead of my own custom driver.
Derek
Derek,
Just a thank you. I used your cloud and rain sensor code to add the same to my obs. I did not use a Raspberry Pi, just the Arduino and ran the web server on the Ekos machine. Then instead of the driver, polled the web server from the Weather Safety Proxy driver as suggested here. The Observatory module took it from there detecting the unsafe condition when raining.