Hello Woody,

fistly, I continue to be amazed at the accuracy and usefulness of the Phidget IR. It has more than once protected my equipment, or opened it up for extended automated use as compared to my earlier reliance on the ClearSky clock (with automated scripts).

I had tried many materials as IR windows (including Saran Wrap), but only one plastic zip lock bag worked adequately, although it generally lowered the clear sky delta from 30 to 24 C. Research showed there are very pricey materials out there, so I shelved that for the moment. Water drops have of course proven troublesome, taking hours to evaporate, often losing me good imaging skies. I decided to add a heater, but to reduce the size of the device (in its home brewed box), I tried to unsolder the sensor from the board to add an extension cable. No matter how much heat I used, I couldn't get the solder to fully wick out (Phidgets support later recommended heating the entire board to 100 C). Since then, an offset of +4 C has been permanently imprinted! But I still have reliable sensing.

So finally I tilted the sensor to 45 degrees from horizon and added a large rain shade over it so only quite oblique rain will reach it. Snow will still manage to stick to it of course, but less than when the sensor was fully exposed. I'm too lazy to build the full heating system it deserves (I though of using a high power fan from electric radio controlled airplanes as they are incredibly powerful and would blow anything off the sensor - draw 25 to 50 amperes at 12 volts, brushless, 1 kg of thrust).

As amazing as the Boltwood and others are, they are very expensive, and my Phidgets is far more reliably/easily *connected* to my home grown observatory s/w than it would be otherwise with these devices [ACP users have the Boltwood talking to ACP to take decisions, whereas my setup is the conductor/master, much to the chagrin of Bob Denny ].

And as you mentioned, Bonjour makes it all a snap; My 13 Phidgets are on a wild bunch of networks (USB via Icron ethernet link, coax 10T ethernet, wireless 54bg) and Bonjour for Windows handles them all with persistance (I don't have to worry about connectivity). Nice that Apple thought of us Windoz users!

Cheers