The pool is still ridiculously warm, but I’m slowly adjusting to swimming in it. I’ve not returned to doing proper USRPT sessions yet though.
There is at least one positive for today though, in that I have reached 200km for the year so far.
USRPT distance this year: 165,800m
Total distance this year: 201,300m
I’m pleased to be able to relate that all the mains wiring in the observatory is now complete and it is connected up to the existing supply from the house. I no longer have extension leads and trailing sockets all over the place which is a big improvement, to say the least.
Yesterday I had quite a big tidy up to get rid of most of the stuff that’s been hanging about “in case I need it” which has also improved things by making much more space. I also refitted the desk (previously removed to make it easier for the cabling to be done) and got most of the trunking finished.
Today I made up a shelving unit to go under the desk so I’d have somewhere to put the 12V PSUs in the warm room and then cut up a discarded length of twin core cable with nice fat conductors (it was on a cement mixer until someone managed to break one end) to feed 12V from the PSUs to the cabling running under the floor. Once that was done I made up the connections at the pier ends. All this whilst repeatedly rolling the roof on and off due to random showers. I could have just left the roof closed, but it was unpleasantly humid here today (I think it was about 90% RH at one point) and I wanted all the ventilation I could get. After that I undertook a ridiculously paranoid level of testing as I was very keen not to feed the wrong polarity to a NEQ6, before powering a mount up and using the handset to point it at whatever objects I thought might be in the afternoon sky (all obscured by clouds, sadly). Apparently Mercury, Venus and the Moon were all there somewhere and Jupiter was just creeping above the eastern horizon.
Finally I took down one of the computers that I intend to use on the piers and connected it up inside the box on one of the piers. It’s all a bit scruffy at the moment, but it might allow me to do a bit of testing later in the week.
At this point I think all that remains in terms of cabling is finshing the network cables (putting the RJ45 plugs on, basically) and deciding on the final routing for the cabling for the power supply for the scope room lights. They’re powered from a 24V PSU that I intend plug into a standard 13A socket in the warm room. I just need to come to a decision about routing the cable between the two and get it sorted. There’s probably no major rush for that though, as I can feed them from one of the IP66 sockets on the warm room wall for the time being.
Either the pool was slightly cooler today or I’m getting used to it, though it was clearly still too warm to be comfortable. Hopefully things will start to sort themselves out next week given that the forecast temperatures are only around 20C.
USRPT distance this year: 165,800m
Total distance this year: 199,500m
I’m starting to find myself wishing for bad weather, which can’t be a good thing in the best summer we’ve had for a decade, quite possibly. I’d swim elsewhere but the other local pools aren’t very convenient to get to, and the water at the shallow end of the best one doesn’t even come up to my waist 🙁
USRPT distance this year: 165,800m
Total distance this year: 197,700m
The pool temperature issue is getting a bit wearing now. It’s not enjoyable trying to swim when it’s over 31C. Apparently the pool heating is turned down as low as it will go. It does make we wonder how much heat is just wasted to the environment in normal use.
USRPT distance this year: 165,800m
Total distance this year: 195,900m
The pool is still way too warm! 31.4C today, apparently. So, same story as before 🙁
USRPT distance this year: 165,800m
Total distance this year: 194,100m
After a month away from construction because of holidays and other stuff going on, this weekend I spent some time working on the power for the piers.
Photos to follow, but each pier now has an IP66-rated cabinet attached (which is probably no longer IP66 as I’ve cut holes in them, but I really only need them to keep dew off the kit inside so that’s hardly a major issue: it’s not as though I’m going to be hosing them down or leaving the roof open in the pouring rain). Inside the cabinet is a double socket and a 12V supply to go to the mount. Once I have the observatory connected up to the electricity supply I’ll be putting a small form factor PC inside as well.
The entire process took somewhat longer than expected whilst I worked out exactly how I was going to have things work, but once the first one was done the next two were considerably quicker.
I also have all the sockets in place in the warm room (eight doubles!) and three double sockets in IP66 housings on the walls of the scope room.
Jobs remaining for the electrics are to install the consumer unit and connect the entire thing up to the mains supply. I also need a couple of sockets to supply the lighting. My intention is to have a separate ring for those that can have a 5A MCB.
Another day with the pool far too warm, so I’m just keeping things ticking over. Looks like the temperature is going to drop a little next week, so hopefully things will improve then.
USRPT distance this year: 165,800m
Total distance this year: 192,300m
Hit the pool with my daughter today and I have to say neither of us particularly enjoyed it. I really struggled and was far hotter than I would normally be whilst swimming. When I left one of the life guards told me that the water temperature was 31.5C, so perhaps that shouldn’t be surprising.
Hopefully it will be better tomorrow, given that the outside temperature should be somewhat lower than today if the forecast is correct.
USRPT distance this year: 165,800m
Total distance this year: 190,500m
Whilst I was on holiday I took a bit of a leap into the unknown and decided I’d try to implement support for DSLRs in the camera library I’ve written for oacapture and related applications, the intent being to use libgphoto2 to control the cameras (and libraw to manipulate the images).
libgphoto2 looks like a very impressive piece of software, supporting a huge number of DSLRs, but the documentation is, well, shall we say “somewhat lacking in depth”? There are a few sample programs that aren’t entirely convincing, and some function-level documentation generated by doxygen that doesn’t really tell you everything you need to know.
I’ve yet to work out what’s going on with the non-PTP2 cameras so I’ve decided to ignore those for the moment and just concentrate on the ones that do support PTP2. At this point I have my code recognising that my Canon 450D is connected and reading its model name to return to the caller. That’s about as far as I’ve got.
Much of the camera interface appears to centre around the concept of “widgets”. If you’re writing a GUI application (as I am) this may be a little confusing given that “widget” is also a term used for an object that appears a in GUI, but in this case the widgets appear to be nodes in a tree of information that describes the camera and its features, arranged in a similar way to a filesystem, in that each node has a “name” that is formed by concatenating the names of all the widgets from the “root” node with the components being separated by the slash (“/”) character. So /main/imgsettings/iso, for example. The leaf nodes represent actual information about the camera and contain data such as whether the data is read only, what type of information it is and what values it can take (if appropriate).
And this is where the fun starts… There doesn’t appear to be any meaningful documentation of what those “name” values can be, nor what they mean in terms of operating the camera. Some, such as /main/imgsettings/iso might be reasonably obvious, but others aren’t so obvious. For example, how does /main/imgsettings/autoiso differ from /main/imgsettings/isoauto, especially if both exist for the same camera?
I have discovered that leaf nodes also have a “label”. The label value appears to be a bit more camera-dependent, but may sometimes help with determining what any given leaf node refers to because it turns out that supported PTP2 cameras have a text file that describes their functions (in camlibs/ptp2/cameras in the source for the library though I’ve no idea if those are pulled into the installed binaries. In these files it appears to be the label that is used to configure what actually happens in terms of the PTP2 protocol, so searching the file for a given camera for the name of a leaf node and then for the associated label may help to work out what it actually does.
There doesn’t appear to be any definitive documentation on all possible values for the “name” fields and it may be that different names actually do the same thing (I can’t be sure at the moment), so writing code that handles all possible options doesn’t appear possible. At the moment I have created a list of 156 different names that are used in the configuration files mentioned above. Perhaps the next step is to pair those with labels and see what makes sense to code up in a first pass.
I’ll post on further progress when I make it.
