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ASCOM.Weather Interface Proposal

1. Use Case

The weather interface is intended to provide an indication to an observatory control application as to whether it is safe to observe. This is required for remote-controlled robotic observatories where the observing equipment must not be exposed to the elements unless conditions are favourable.

2. Implementation

The ASCOM.Weather interface shall consist of a single effective property, which will return a boolean value that can be used directly to determine if it is safe to observe. In the case of a dome, this can be interpreted as 'safe for the shutter to be open'. For a structure with a roll-off roof, the interpretation would be 'safe for the roof to be open'. There may be other interpretations for other structures. The property may be polled before an observing session to determine if it is safe to open and during an observing session to determine if it is necessary to close.

The interface shall provide a single effective method, that will display the configuration interface to the user. The content of the setup dialog is completely at the discretion of the driver developer. The setup dialog should provide a means to configure any decision logic that the driver uses in determining if it is safe to observe.

The Weather interface may be implemented by a stand-alone driver but more likely will be exposed by a dedicated weather monitoring application or another driver for a device that has built in weather monitoring hardware.

The type of monitoring equipment and the decision logic used is likely to be specific to each installation. Therefore no attempt is made to specify how this decision is made. The decision logic shall be completely at the discretion of the driver developer.

3. Exclusions

The interface explicitly excludes any attempt to provide measurements or data logging capabilities. Such capabilities are unnecessary for the use case described and are more appropriately provided by purpose-designed software.

4. Interface definition

Miscellaneous methods and properties that are common to all ASCOM drivers are omitted for clarity. For a full interface definition, please refer to the example implementation.

4.1 Methods

void SetupDialog()

Displays the setup dialog. This user interface should provide a means of configuring whatever decision logic is used in deciding if it is safe to observe.

4.2 Properties

boolean Safe (readonly)

This property returns a boolean value that can be used directly to determine whether it is safe to observe.