ACP Plan Editor

As en exercise in manipulating classes in VB.NET I have written a little editor for ACP Plans. This does NOT create plans (a la Planner), although you can manually enter a plan. It is basically a replacement for using Notepad.

I keep making errors when modifying my plans, so I hope this will enforce a little bit of rigor in my editing. For example, I often get different filter numbers in Count / Interval / Binning / Filter commands. I also have trouble going from Local to UTC time, and often can't remember the various parameters of commands.

Anyway, have a look if you like; let me know if it has problems :) The setup file is attached.

Nice!! Thanks for contributing this, Brew.

Hey Rob - this is cool! Thanks for doing this. Am just playing around with it now, but what a clever little program. Feature suggestion for v1.1 - if I open a blank plan and hit the red ?, it says "junk". Maybe it could say something a tiny bit more constructive. ;-)
Anyway, I was blown away by the amount of effort you put in ! Especially the help documentation. Awesome ! Thanks again!

After this gets some miles in the hands of a few others, I'd be interested in distributing it with ACP Planner (free).

Attached is a fixed version 1.1.0.0.

- Plans were sometimes being saved in UTF encoding instead of Ascii. This causes ACP to report a plan error, showing a weird "character" something like ?=>.

- Fixed Colin's catch of help request when no command is selected.

Bob, feel free to use it however you like:)

Hey Rob,
Awesome useful program, I played with it, liked very much ,BrewPlanEdit will save me a lot of time in the future.
Thank you.

I am a complete Newbie to ACP and this utility will be of tremendous help! Thank you Mr. Brewington! The Local Time feature alone is worth the money!

Robert,

So far so good, except for:

- Each time the file is saved in BrewPlanEdit it results in adding a comment to an existing comment. So you get " ;Comment ;Comment ;Comment " etc.


-On my system, it appears that BrewPlanEdit saves the plan text file using "UTF-8" encoding, as oppoesed to ANSI. I know this because when I open the text file in Notepad and immediately save it in Notepad, the encoding method shown in the Save As dialogue box defaults to "UTF-8" even if I previously saved a file as ANSI. This UTF-8 encoding causes a compile error in ACP Schedule Browser during plan import that reads:

Error at line 1: #interval has not ever been set
(1) -> #startsetnum 1

-Opening the plan in Notepad and saving it using ANSI encoding results in successful Schedule Browser compilation

Also, during Schedule Browser compilation I get:

Target "#chill -25" cannot be used, will be skipped.
Force subsequent images to "!TheSkyX Camera Add-on Images"
Wizard Nebula (CoordJ2000)

I assume #Chill is for StartupObs?

I'm glad you like my utility.

The Ascii problem was fixed in version 1.1, attached to an earlier post in this thread.

I don't understand what is happening with the comments you are referring to; perhaps you could send me a sample file? I could not reproduce a problem like you describe:(

- the #chill -25 command causes your plan to wait awhile until your camera reaches -25 degrees C. Does your camera support cooling?

Also, it sounds like you are using Scheduler? I do not have that, so I can't check your situation. I thought Scheduler did not use ACP plans, but has a separate subset of commands available?

Anyway, it doesn't sound like a BrewPlanEdit issue; it sounds like an issue using the command in the first place. If you create a plan in Notepad with the #chill command, does it work?

Lastly, I have attached version 1.3, which has a couple of enhancements:

1) Comments are colored green so I can distinguish them from real commands.

2) There is an option to use a different font. We Older Men need bigger fonts than standard Windows:)

3) You can pop your file out to a Notepad, do some editing, and the changed file is read back into BrewPlanEdit. Occasionally I want to do some type of special editing; typically this means doing a bunch of copy/paste commands. This way I can do things in Notepad and return to BrewPlanEdit. I do this rarely so it is not well tested.

Brew