PHD2 log viewer

[john.l....@gmail.com]

Is there a version or feature for the log viewer that could quickly read through the guiding files and crunch the numbers and write the important calculations to a CSV file.

I was thinking now that I have 6+ months of guiding logs it might be nice to see if things are improving or not over time. It will be a bit tedious to open each log file and manually type the stuff into Excel. I figured I should check here first.

I figured something like Session Start time, Duration, Side of Pier, RA RMS, DEC RMS, TOT RMS, Peak RA, Peak DEC errors, would be a good start. There might be a few other numbers that could be useful. I should have started something like this a while back... it's something to do when it's cloudy.

John

[Brian Valente]

HI John

afaik there is not a feature or other app that does that

also I'm not sure how useful that would be. there are so many variables over months regarding guiding performance, i don't know how you could determine what is actual improvement and what is variation in seeing, choice of targets/declination, etc. 

you could start just by going through the logs and recording the total RMS for each session. that would give you a reasonable idea of any trends without having to spend too much time doing it

Brian 

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Open PHD Guiding" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to open-phd-guidi...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/open-phd-guiding/c40571f3-ea64-43ac-adc3-4345c4efb130n%40googlegroups.com.

--

Brian 

Brian Valente

portfolio brianvalentephotography.com 

[John Nagy]

Thanks Brian. That's my plan.... just record a few numbers from each log/session and make a quick plot to see if there are any trends over the long term. I work in the space/satellite business and long term trending is very useful and often underutilized. Something may be changing at a slow rate from week to week and it can go unnoticed. Look at a 6 month plot and it will jump right out.

If I was recording values all along it would only take a minute or two each day when I review the logs. Now that I've waited .... it could take a while. It would be easy enough to copy all the logs into one directory and then let some software chew through them. I was just making sure there wasn't some super secret method of doing that already.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/open-phd-guiding/CAJa45i6On9Wog5Eh%2B2FU-FKTfF3j%3DoD2eL3xWcicai5xXoCiNA%40mail.gmail.com.

[John Nagy]

PS: You can be sure I'll take most of the data I need by searching through the text logs and extracting things like start times first. Then I'll go back and fill in the session stats one at a time.

[Pict...@earthlink.net]

John, love the idea!  This seems like exactly what BI tools are made for.  You say you work in the space/satellite business.  Does your workplace have BI tools you could apply to this?  I do not expect to find any within the budgets of casual users.  (I do not consider Excel to be a BI tool.)  Please let us know what you find out from your investigation.

Manning B

[John Nagy]

I'm not sure what the hottest tools are right now. I've used a variety of trending tools over the years to look at the data. They're almost all small use proprietary and used for a few missions (NASA) and then set aside in search of something better. The team I'm working with now tends to use a lot of MatLab. The main issue with most tools is data volume. Sometimes you have data at 1Hz and something you have data at 10Hz. 860k points per day needs to be boiled down or it gets really difficult to plot effectively and see the trends over weeks and months.

For my own personal investigation, I wasn't working with a mountain of data, I just used Excel. Sadly, I can't seem to find my guide logs from Jan.-March of this year. I thought they should be on my portable drive in a subfolder accompanying each night's images but they were not. They're more than likely gone for good now. I was able to go back to the beginning of April though. As was expected there is a lot of variation. I looked at every session longer than 30 minutes (which turned out to be 50).  I do see a slight upward trend in my RMS values. My total RMS (average) was 1.04 at the start of April and has since grown to 1.15. Is this signficant... maybe not with such a small sample size. I'm definitely going to keep an eye on it from now on. I have good nights guiding and I have bad nights guiding as I'm sure everyone does.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/open-phd-guiding/3472ccd7-b7f8-470e-8032-7ac4fa9713cfn%40googlegroups.com.

[Bryan]

John

FYI from the documentation

PHD2 automatically removes debug logs that are more than 30 days old and guide logs that are more than 60days old. If you want to retain the files for longer periods, you should move or copy them to a different folder location, one not used by PHD2.

Bryan

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to open-phd...@googlegroups.com.

[John Nagy]

Sorry, I should have been more clear. I've been copying them off every night. I thought I'd been doing it since January but I might have only started in April.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/open-phd-guiding/febe8a75-bed2-4103-a663-ab05335bd2bfo%40googlegroups.com.

[Brian Valente]

Hi John

>>>My total RMS (average) was 1.04 at the start of April and has since grown to 1.15. Is this signficant... maybe not with such a small sample size

The challenge is to find things to correlate to this, right? 

I'm more thinking along the lines of seeing temperature, seeing conditions, transparency, etc. which I think would have more of an impact. It's not lost on me April is late spring and now we're into summer.

if there's some way you can log and keep track of data like that, i think that could be illuminating 

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/open-phd-guiding/CACK_eWu3abK309nwOhc6hVXBbD2e5UKbKnBr2khprXwvyTB5mw%40mail.gmail.com.

[Andy Galasso]

On Fri, Sep 11, 2020 at 4:11 PM John wrote:

Is there a version or feature for the log viewer that could quickly read through the guiding files and crunch the numbers and write the important calculations to a CSV file.

John,

Although there is no such feature currently, the log viewer source code is freely available and you are welcome to customize it to your needs.  https://github.com/agalasso/phdlogview

You can submit a github Pull Request to have your changes incorporated into the app. Or you can just grab the log parser code and use that for your own app.

Andy

[John Nagy]

Nice of you to offer but I'm definitely not a software developer. My skills at code are laughable. 

Thanks.

--

You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Open PHD Guiding" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to open-phd-guidi...@googlegroups.com.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/open-phd-guiding/CAKemMNXVYM_38Z2xv6%2B6-N97GpALP2KNof6jMAJ790nju7un_A%40mail.gmail.com.