ACP weather Server

Is the ACP weather server capable of providing weather data to other observatories. I have 2 observatories and would like to purchase either a foster system weather sentry or a AAG cloud sensor and weather station and make the data usable by more than one observatory. Is this possible?

You would have to ask those companies for a definitive answer. ACP doesn't provide weather it uses it. With that said, I can tell you how the problem was solved at New Mexico Skies. They have a single master Boltwood Cloud Sensor. The Cloud Sensor has a companion program called Clarity which is scriptable (the key!). I wrote weather servers that connect to Clarity's scripting interface. NM SKies uses a thing called a "virtual serial port" whhich makes it look like a Cloud Sensor is connected to many observatory computers, though only one real Cloud Sensor exists. Thus, ACP running on more than one observatory can share a single Cloud Sensor.

Hopefully this will point you in a productive direction. I'm happy to help. Perhaps you can provide a few more details given the above...

Bob,

Thanks for the reply. When I saw the help document listing as weather server, I thought the name might imply the networkin capability, thinking about server client models. So the ACP weather server operates just a client to any of the weather data that is available. It's just a matter of finding a way to make the data available to ACP.

Todd

To be precise, ACP itself is the client to the weather server. The latter provides weather data to ACP.

Ah!!! Perspective is everything. That does make sense. The server basically gathers the data which is provided to it by the necessary means and make it available to the ACP client. Thanks for the clarification.

So I guess you couldn't have 2 independent ACP clients acquiring data from the weather server on the same network? I'm assuming The ACP client and the ACP weather server must reside on the same machine?

Todd

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So I guess you couldn't have 2 independent ACP clients acquiring data from the weather server on the same network? I'm assuming The ACP client and the ACP weather server must reside on the same machine?

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Well.... where there's a will there's a way. Suppose your weather station posted its info to a web server somewhere. Then you could have ACP weather servers that periodically GET a web page and extract the weather info from it. Just one of many ideas depending on what you have, how much money you have, and how skilled/clever you are! :-)))

Thanks Bob,

I guess it looks like networked weather server is only available through CCDastro's weather watcher. http://ccdastro.net/WeatherWatcher%20ACP.pdf This probably means having to buy the boltwood.

The following is taken from the manual:

Networking WeatherWatcher ACP

We have built in the ability to setup the WeatherWatcher ACP on the observatory computer or use a networked "Weather Computer" to run several observatories. That means if you have more than one observatory on site you will only need one weather station and one Boltwood Sky Sensor to provide information to each WeatherWatcher ACP equipped observatory. This of course means that all of your computers are able to communicate over a local network.


I thought someone might have thought of broadcasing the information on a broadcast address or something. Look like ccdastro is just using a text file to an ftp site.

Hmmm decisions, decisions!

I guess I might be a little premature with the previous statement. It looks like the AAG cloud sensor software has similar capabilities for multiple observatories. I found the following in the AAG cloud sensor docs.



The CloudWatcher software allows different PCs on the same local area network to share the information of the same CloudWatcher Device. The program runs in "Master" mode (physically connected PC) and "Remote" mode on any other PC in the network

Nice! Thanks for passing this info along.

One more find to report so that others might benifit.

Foster Systems Astro Alert Weather Monitor:

I got an email respons with the following: Yes we produce the Boltwood II one line format file with data from the Astro alert weather monitor. It has all the data depending on the options available. Make that file shared on the network using shared folders. On the other end use our Dashboard software to read the BoltwoodII data and produce the required formats for ACP. From that point forward AstroMC will access the Boltwood data file via your local network drive. Haven't confirmed but ACP might read that format directly now.

So it looke like there is methods for all three sensors to share the weather data with other observatories on the same network!

Bob thanks for the help.

If the AstroMC file is written using the Boltwood sharing/locking scheme, then the ACP "BoltwoodFile" weather server (which ships with ACP) will work.