Hi Bob,

Thanks for the clarification. I'm hoping someone out there can advise me on the best way to proceed. Here's my problem (which is really a FocusMax issue, not ACP):

I'm writing code that looks at all of our images from the night (currently it does it the following day, but once perfected, it will run alongside data collection). I keep track of the FWHM of the images, so we can see how well we are staying in focus. I'd like to mark in my logs and plots when a FocusMax run happens and parse out the results (position, temperature, best HFD, etc.).

I'm running in to a problem that the FocusMax logs are difficult to parse. The reason is that when FM starts, it creates a log file named with the current date and time (local time). It then populates that logs until FM is closed. The issue is that each line has the local time, but no date indicator. When FM runs for several days at a time, this means that it becomes difficult to disentangle which day a particular focus run occurred. In principle, I can do some counting to keep track, but that becomes more difficult if a night of observations is missed due to weather. I'm hoping there is a simple way to parse these logs. Has anyone else run in to this and found an elegant solution?

My tentative idea is to use the Windows 7 "Task Scheduler" and schedule it to start FocusMax each afternoon. There is an option to "Stop task if it runs longer than ...". If I set that to 1 day, then I'm hoping FocusMax will stop and a new instance will be started, thereby ending the previous night's log and creating a new log for this night. I haven't tested this yet (ask me in a few days), but it seems like a kludge to me and I'm hoping there is a better way.

cheers,
Josh