Planner: How to setthe "ACP drive?"

[Mike Dodd]

You tell planner to create a flat plan in Preferences; see he attached screen shot. If you don't tick "Specify the file name," Planner creates it from your plan file name + "-flats."

in the past, there was just the file name with no path, but now planner adds the path and gives the "non-portable" warning.

---Mike

[Bob Denny]

I'm sorry guys I'm tied up online with another issue. I haven't changed Planner in ages. If needed I'll remove the warning or dry to figure out what's happening. I'm sorry.

[Dick Berg]

Okay. I don't use Planner much, but I'll try this again a bit later to see if I get the same result as you. TTYL.

Okay. I didn't wait until later.

I checked the box in the Preferences. I did not check the specify Plan box. Now I got this in the ACP plan:

...
;
#duskflats NewFlatPlan-flats.txt ; Acquire flat fields at dusk
;
;
; === Target V1066 Cyg ===
;
...

This is not "not portable." I see Planner opens the flat plan for editing, and then allows forwarding it to the Plans folder on the observatory computer, if necessary.

So, this seems to work for me. I think this must have to do with how you name your ACP plan when you save it. SOmehow it must have the full file spec attached.

[William Bristow]

Hi Mike, Bob, Dick.

As far as I can tell there isn't a problem with the way that Mike is describing the file path being saved in the flat plan when using Planner.

I ran some tests on my Windows 10 and 11 VM's with planner 4.2.6 and as described in the user guide for Planner, under the section "Flat Planning (advanced)", scroll to the bottom paragraph "Flat Plan name and Location" it tells you specifically that if you enable the option in planner preferences to Specify a File Name then your flat plans will be saved with a file path that can't be ported to another computer.

See below for the relevant extract of the help document.

Mike, I can't explain why your previous installation of Planner did not have this behaviour, perhaps you were using an older version of Planner? but the current version 4.2.6 is behaving exactly as described in the Planner help docs.

William

Screenshot 2024-02-16 at 21.42.28.png

[Bob Denny]

I can't repro the problem either. I wonder if it has to do with uninstalling OneDrive and the results of that on the special "Documents" folder. Planner uses the OS to get the path to the current logged in user's 'Documents' folder. This should always work. The warning says that the flat plan is in a different folder from the observing plan or has a different name (not YourPlan-flats). From your screen shot you don't have the "Specify File Name" box checked.

I'm probably going to need to watch you do this so I can see where it's going wrong. What are a few times I could get on live with you? Not today (Sunday).

(moved to the Planner section)