ACP includes weather safety and monitoring. This is an "open" interface; it requires a scriptable weather server which at a minimum must support connect/disconnect and must report safe/unsafe status. Environmental properties are also supported, but are optional.

ACP user Chuck Faranda has already developed WeatherWatcher for ACP, an ACP weather server that provides support for many popular weather stations, as well as the Boltwood Cloud Sensor.

Features

• Safe/unsafe status is polled every 10 sec. If weather becomes unsafe, an alarm is sounded, any currently executing script is aborted, and an optional ACP-Weather.xxx script is run. This script can close the observatory, etc.
• Any ACP script can monitor environmental data (if provided by the weather server). This includes "event handlers" for startup, slewing, and imaging.
• Available weather information is displayed on an ACP web page.
• Web users are prevented from opening and imaging if the weather is unsafe.

Developer Support

We also provide information needed develop weather servers for virtually any source of weather info. A sample scriptable weather server (a simulator) is provided in VB6, as well as a template Windows Script Component that serves the required methods and properties. The simulator is selected when ACP is installed.

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