Pre- session and post- session automatization

[Bob Denny]

Ivan -- These are all features of ACP Expert Scheduler. In addition, it selects which sessions to run at which time, and will start and stop with unsafe weather interruptions. Therefore these featurews are not part of the basic ACP observing engine. I believe we discussed ACP Expert Scheduler when we were scoping out your project but you had decided to provide time slots and not "photons-collection time" to provide.

If you want to do this without Expert Scheduler then you can write Windows Scripts to do these startup and shutdown actions. I have attached the "template" startup and shutdown scripts that ACP Expert Scheduler ships with. They are written to run inside ACP's console, but with small modification they can be used from the Windows OS "cscript.exe" engine and scheduled in the Windows OS task scheduler.

Another possibility would be to use the UserActions extensions for ACP. The "ScriptStart and ScriptEnd actions would be called at the beginning and ending of a "session" Of course you cannot know if another session will follow. However there is a separate UserAction "Shutdown" that will run when a #shutdown directive is encountered in an ACP observing plan. This is where you could do your powering down.

Another possibility would be to trigger a run of CCD Commander to handle the shutdown sequencing. Personally, though, I would prefer to have full control through Javascript and the API of ACP and the Windows OS.