Ok, I admit it, I'm stupid :-). I can't figure out how to make the 'Autoopen' function work (Version 2.1.5). I've read the help file about 20 times, but the UI doesn't make sense to me. The file-open dialog has a default value of 'Select Destination Folder' - destination for what? If I click on the pulldown there, I get a list of filenames, not folders. And if I choose a folder from the "Look in" combo box at the top, the dialog closes, but CCDI doesn't react to new files being saved there. It does analyze the existing image files there but doesn't react to new ones. I know others use this feature, so it must be me - but this UI sequence seems pretty foreign to me.

Thanks for any help - I'd really like to use this for more accurate real-time analysis of my images as they come in.

By the way, the single-star collimation feature is gonzo, completely worth the price of the upgrade all by itself.

Thanks..

Bruce W.

Hi Bruce,

Don't feel bad -- the folder selection UI in Windows is just not very intuitive! You must be viewing the inside of the folder you want to monitor in order for the folder to be selected. And, you can select any file already in the folder, or possibly even something that's not there (like the text "Select destination Folder") in order to tell CCDI what folder to watch. It doesn't matter what file you select in the folder, as long as you are viewing INSIDE that folder -- CCDI will ignore the file name, and will just use the folder location.

What camera/software are you using? If CCDI loads the existing images in the folder, then you have selected the correct folder, despite the UI

When your software writes new images to the folder, what format are they? What's file extension? And what version of Windows are you using?

By the way, a similar feature exists in CCDI called Generic Camera Driver. This allows only the new images to be loaded, analyzed, and then, optionally, deleted off the hard disk. Depending on what you are doing (like focusing, collimating, etc) this may be a better way for you to achieve the same goal.

Regards,

-Paul

One more thought:

If you are selecting a folder to monitor that is on the network (for example, on a remote computer, or on a network-attached drive) then the auto-open feature may not work: most network file system drivers I've encountered do not provide notification when a new file is written to a folder not physically attached to the local computer.

If that's the case, try using CCDI and select an auto-open folder on the same computer and see if that works better.

Regards,

-Paul

Thanks for the quick response, Paul. I'm using a very common set-up - an SBIG ST-2000XM and MaximDL for capture on the local hard drive, so the files are being written in FITS format. CCDI has no trouble opening the files - but it didn't react to new images placed there by Maxim. I want to use the AutoOpen function as a more refined version of your real-time FWHM tool. Now that I understand how the UI works, I will test it again the next time I can get to the observatory. At least now I will know it's not a problem with selecting the input folder - and who knows, maybe I was just tired. :-)

Bruce W.

I finally got back to this, and I now have it working. BUT - it looks like the monitored folder should contain *only* image files. In my earlier tries, I was using a parent folder that had other file types, like MaximDL sequence definitions. For those folders, the auto-open function doesn't work. Once I started storing newly captured images in sub-directories, the auto-open worked great.

Thanks.

BruceW

quote:

Originally posted by BruceW:
Thanks for the quick response, Paul. I'm using a very common set-up - an SBIG ST-2000XM and MaximDL for capture on the local hard drive, so the files are being written in FITS format. CCDI has no trouble opening the files - but it didn't react to new images placed there by Maxim. I want to use the AutoOpen function as a more refined version of your real-time FWHM tool. Now that I understand how the UI works, I will test it again the next time I can get to the observatory. At least now I will know it's not a problem with selecting the input folder - and who knows, maybe I was just tired. :-)

Bruce W.

Hi Bruce,

Glad you got it sorted out. Yes, CCDI AutoOpen function picks up all the files in the specified folder, images and all others.

Since CCDI understands many hundreds of image formats, there's no easy way for it to determine if a file is an image or not by looking at just the file name. So, it loads every file and attempts to process each one to figure out if it contains an image or not.

Regards,

-Paul