Planalyzer - major enhancement

[Mike Dodd]

I'm pleased to announce that Planalyzer has been upgraded to version 1.10. Information, screen shots, and a download link are available here http://astronomy.mdodd.com/planalyzer.html

Enhancements include:

• Unlimited number of events (no longer limited to 12), with a scrollbar on the list.
• Adjust exposure counts to fit available time (not new, but slightly enhanced).
• Highlight #WAITUNTIL events that occur more than 15 minutes before or after the end time of the preceding event. Useful for identifying mistakes in the plan (did I accidentally roll time in TheSky between targets when creating the plan?).
• Includes Planner autofocus preferences when calculating plan duration.
• Inserts Autofocus events between the imaging events in the list, so autofocus times are not hidden in imaging times.
• A prettier GUI (IMO, anyway ).

Comments and suggestions are welcome. Please let me know if you encounter any bugs.

Mike

[Bob Denny]

WOW!!!! The hits just keep on coming :-)

[Mike Dodd]

WOW!!!! The hits just keep on coming :-)

It was an excellent exercise in object-oriented programming. Each blue event in the list is a self-contained object, and extremely easy to manipulate. I feel really good about the new design.

Mike

[Dick Berg]

Mike, good job again. You just can't keep a software engineer down! I've added a link to your website in my Reference Guidek, and finally posted it.

[Mike Dodd]

Mike, good job again. You just can't keep a software engineer down! I've added a link to your website in my Reference Guide, and finally posted it.

Thanks, Dick.

I'm beginning to appreciate the benefits of knowing an accurate plan run-time. Last night ACP didn't start my plan correctly -- it bypassed the target and went immediately to the dark frames. It was 15 minutes before I finally discovered and fixed the typo in the plan, , so I had to quickly time-fit the number of exposures to meet a hard behind-the-tree deadline. I did this in Planalyzer in less than a minute.

Also, my confidence in Planalyzer's accuracy is growing. It said that last night's plan would run for 03:24:04, and using the log analyzer this morning showed it really took 03:24:06 -- only two seconds difference.

Earlier I had discovered that my pointing update time in Planner was set too short. So I changed it to what Planalyzer's log analyzer said it really was, and now Planalyzer's calculated plan duration closely matches the log.

I'm really pleased with Planalyzer.

Mike

[Dick Berg]

Good job, Mike.

One thing that would be a good enhancement would be to be able to widen, or especially lengthen, the application's window. My screen is tall and I use a pretty high resolution, so if I could make the window taller, my plan would in many cases fit in one screen without scrolling. I'm not suggesting you eliminate the scroll bar. But if a user could have a variable sized window, then the plan frame and the scrolling time frame could also be longer.

Two small problems?:

I for me that when I load the profile, I don't get the right filters. I load the "Active Profile" - see PlanZ.png.

Also, having loaded a profile, if I try to load a profile again, I get an unhandled exception error - see UnHanEx.png


Edit: I also have attached the ActiveProfile.xml file so that you can play with it. Perhaps mine has some construct that's different from the ones you've been building Planalyzer with. Just rename it .xml if you need to.

[Mike Dodd]

Good job, Mike.

One thing that would be a good enhancement would be to be able to widen, or especially lengthen, the application's window. My screen is tall and I use a pretty high resolution, so if I could make the window taller, my plan would in many cases fit in one screen without scrolling. I'm not suggesting you eliminate the scroll bar. But if a user could have a variable sized window, then the plan frame and the scrolling time frame could also be longer.

Done. Resizing is most useful vertically. The exposure list and plan window increase in height, and the plan-end clock at the bottom moves with the increased height. The scrollbar disappears if all the exposures fit in the list. Horizontal resizing does nothing except widen the main window. The exposure list does not get wider, nor do the exposures in the list.

Two small problems?:

I for me that when I load the profile, I don't get the right filters. I load the "Active Profile" - see PlanZ.png.

Also, having loaded a profile, if I try to load a profile again, I get an unhandled exception error - see UnHanEx.png

I believe your incorrect filters were coming from presets in the profile. Planalyzer did not correctly recognize these presets, and grabbed the filter definitions wherever it found them. All the properties go into a hash table, so probably (I'm guessing) the first 10 filter values in the hash table were displayed. I didn't see a preset in your profile that had that combination of filters, but they are all in there in various places.

I modified Planalyzer to skip over everything in the profile presets section.

The unhandled exception was due to an incorrectly-initialized DateTime object when a profile was loaded a second time. Planalyzer was trying to subtract the UTC offset from the earliest possible date a DateTime can hold.

This bug has been corrected as well.

Thanks for the suggestion and feedback.

Mike

[Dick Berg]

Hi Mike,

I'm glad those little problems were an easy fix. If I notice anything else, you'll be the second to know.

Thanks.

[George Sjoberg]

Hi Mike,

Wow! What a great piece of work!! Thank - you. I've been using if for only two days and already don't know how I got along without it!

One minor issue:

The "Analysis Pane" doesn't seem to accurately know the length of the Planalyzer Window. With the scroll thumb at the very bottom there are entries further down that are not visible. Resizing the Planalyzer window by dragging the bottom edge upward results in more entries not being visible. I have dragged the top and bottom edges to their max and still there our analysis entries not visible. Changing the Run Property to Maximize doesn't fix the problem? I'm running Planalyzer 1.15. It is running on a rempte PC that I'm controlling with Radmin.

Again thanks for your effort on this marvelous program.

Wishing you a prosperous New Year,

..george

[Mike Dodd]

Hi Mike,

Wow! What a great piece of work!! Thank - you. I've been using if for only two days and already don't know how I got along without it!

Thanks, George. I'm finding it very useful myself. I see Bob created a whole category for Planalyzer -- I'm flattered.

quote=George Sjoberg;18720]
One minor issue:

The "Analysis Pane" doesn't seem to accurately know the length of the Planalyzer Window. With the scroll thumb at the very bottom there are entries further down that are not visible. Resizing the Planalyzer window by dragging the bottom edge upward results in more entries not being visible.[/quote]

Try the latest version http://astronomy.mdodd.com/planalyzer.html I modified the scroll bar's behavior to consider the number of exposures in the list and the window height.

Happy New Year, everyone.

Mike