I'm the proud DIY'er
who made a solution to monitor the whole night sky in an automated fashion by
following Thomas Jacquin's Instructables DIY (https://www.instructables.com/id/Wireless-All-Sky-Camera/)
project. Not only did he publish the h/w steps but he's got a killer github
repo too (https://github.com/thomasjacquin)!
Here's the whole
article on my process and methods - http://astromaphilli14.blogspot.com/2019/03/my-diy-astropi-allsky-system.html
Heat on the
roofline, where I mounted it, and lack of cooling within the allskyPi forced me
to get a creative solution to run properly at night and shutdown when the core
cpu temp gets too high.
Shutting a Linux
machine like a RaspberryPi is trivial but I'm as thorough as I can be and since
my Pi is PoE powered, I wanted an extra layer of assurance.
I also power my PoE
adapter via a Cisco IOS Switch, which has a cool feature called
'Energywise' this allowed that admin to
set a schedule of when to power off at a set time of day.
Shutting the Pi and
then 5 minutes later powering off the PoE works fairly well if your clocks are
synced. Syncing clocks is again trivial
but because I shut the device based upon the heat the sun provides, guess what
problem comes next? Yes, season
variations are at play as my sunset time in winter at 5pm versus 9pm in summer
means that I'm potentially missing out on some nighttime observation.
So instead of
statically setting the energywise time as in the following example:
!
interface
GigabitEthernet1/0/5
description Gi1/0/5 - PubVC - AllskyPi
switchport access vlan 491
switchport mode access
energywise level 10 recurrence importance 90
at 4 20 * * 1-7
energywise level 0 recurrence importance 90 at
51 10 * * 1-7
spanning-tree portfast
!
Which power's up the
Pi at 8:04PM localtime and powers off at 10:51AM, I can, using a script that
runs on the Pi execute the following logic:
- Decide normal operation temperature high water mark in a file
- Read the temp from file, which allows manipulation without script restart
- Clear previous night's start/shut timers with ssh / pexpect
- Loop monitor the temperature X < Y
- I had to insert a condition when the 'endOfNight' script runs that ups the high water mark before the script starts with a simple echo > and then back to the normal temp at end of script.
- If the temp exceeds the limit:
- Read new sunset times for boot up time and set on switch
- Set shutdown timer +5min from current time on switch
- Log messages
- Shutdown the Pi
- Wait until sunset, power up, rinse and repeat.
Here's some logs of
the device booting up:
Aug 12 14:19:09:
%ILPOWER-7-DETECT: Interface Gi1/0/5: Power Device detected: IEEE PD
Aug 12 14:19:10:
%ILPOWER-5-POWER_GRANTED: Interface Gi1/0/5: Power granted
Aug 12 14:19:23:
%LINK-3-UPDOWN: Interface GigabitEthernet1/0/5, changed state to up
Aug 12 14:19:24:
%LINEPROTO-5-UPDOWN: Line protocol on Interface GigabitEthernet1/0/5, changed
state to up
Finally the script
is on my Github page - https://github.com/maphilli14/allskysuppliments
