New Feature : Support for Solar Scintillation Monitors

[admin]

Hi,

SharpCap 4.1.13447 adds initial support for solar scintillation monitoring devices to help capture solar images when the seeing is at its best. Currently the SSM3 by Analog Astronomical Devices (https://www.analog-astronomical-device. ... on-monitor) is supported (thanks to Marc at Analog Astronomical Devices for working with me to get this going and providing a sample device to test with). If you have a different type of Scintillation Monitor device and you would like that to be supported in SharpCap, please get in touch, as it shouldn't be too difficult to add alternate hardware.

The first step is to configure your hardware in the SharpCap hardware settings - scroll down to find the 'Seeing Monitors' section, choose the SSM3 from the list and then use the 'Properties' button to pick the right serial port to read data from.

Screenshot 2025-06-30 160103.png (23.26 KiB) Viewed 4337 times

Once this is set up, open your solar imaging camera and choose 'Scintillation Seeing Monitor' from the tools menu to launch the scintillation monitor tool, then click the 'Connected' checkbox to connect to the hardware.

Screenshot 2025-06-30 161325.png (20.98 KiB) Viewed 4331 times

Once connected, SharpCap will start capturing the current seeing value from the hardware about 4 times per second and will plot a graph of how that value changes over time along with a graph of the raw voltage reading from the hardware (the voltage reading can be used to indicate cloud and also used for calibration of the device). The image below shows a graph of some simulated data from a dummy device, so real seeing data won't look like this, but it shows the dual nature of the graph along with the summary seeing scores shown on the right

Screenshot 2025-06-30 161542.png (32.08 KiB) Viewed 4331 times

Once you have an idea of what values mean 'good' seeing under your current conditions, you can set the threshold level (the horizontal dashed green line) by either clicking on the graph or by adjusting the threshold value on the left. SharpCap will treat seeing values below this threshold as 'good' and above as 'bad' seeing.

There are three auto capture modes that you can use:

• 'Trigger Start' - this will start a new capture when the seeing value falls below the threshold. That capture will run for the number of frames specified in the 'Frame Count' box, regardless of how the seeing value changes after the capture starts.
• 'Trigger Start/Stop' - this will start a new capture when the seeing falls below the thresold and stop it when the seeing rises back up above the threshold again (subject to a minimum capture time of 2s). The 'Frame Count' value is ignored in this mode
• 'Trigger Start & Filter' - this will start a new capture when the seeing value falls below the threshold, then keep capturing until the Frame Count is reached. If the seeing value rises above the threshold before this happens then the capture will pause (bad seeing frames will not be saved to file and will show as 'dropped'). When the seeing value drops below the threshold, saving will resume, repeating until the frame count is reached.

To actually start the auto capture in one of the modes, press the 'Enable' button (pressing 'Disable' will stop any capture in progress and not start any new ones until enabled again).

You can also change the averaging period for the seeing data from 0.25s up to 10s and reset or save the seeing history data.

Note that using the auto capture function with a scintillation monitor is a SharpCap Pro feature.

thanks,

Robin

[bobo99]

Hey there,

Would we be able to add support for the AiryLabs SSM ?

I don't have the hardware to share with you (other than the one I use), however I wrote this linux client to capture data from it in python. May be easy for you to port the reading from serial?

https://github.com/bojangles9/airylabss ... /main/b.py


Happy to test it.

Cheers

[admin]

Hi,

no problem - probably the easiest thing for me would be if you could capture the serial output of the device to a text file for say 60 seconds or so (make sure that all the things it can send in the output do appear). Then send me that text file and I can use it to test and make sure my code is handling all the right stuff.

cheers,

Robin

[bobo99]

Hi,

no problem - probably the easiest thing for me would be if you could capture the serial output of the device to a text file for say 60 seconds or so (make sure that all the things it can send in the output do appear). Then send me that text file and I can use it to test and make sure my code is handling all the right stuff.

cheers,

Robin

See attached.

"A" is the seeing
"B" is the input (the raw input voltage that is coming off the sensor)
"C" is the 1 minute average, of the seeing.


Let me know if that's enough. Initial serial connection had some weird binary data, which I just ignore.

Here is how I connect to the serial port:
serial_port = '/dev/ttyUSB0' # Serial port for the device
baud_rate = 115200 # Baud rate set to 115200
data_bits = serial.EIGHTBITS
parity = serial.PARITY_NONE
stop_bits = serial.STOPBITS_ONE

[admin]

Hi,

yep, that info looks good - I will try to get that added sometime this week, so look out for an update at the beginning of September with this added in.

Good old putty Where would we be without it!

cheers,

Robin

[admin]

Hi @bobo99,

is there any chance that you could check to see if the device produces anything different on the output in the case of 'lost signal' (ie if you cover the sensor so no light is falling on it)? The SSM3 gives a lost signal message, which SharpCap spots, so it would be nice to include that for the Airylab device too.

I suppose if there is nothing special on the output for lost signal then some sort of threshold on the raw signal measurement might work (below a certain level counts as lost signal), but I'm not sure what a good threshold would be.

cheers,

Robin

[bobo99]

Hi @bobo99,

is there any chance that you could check to see if the device produces anything different on the output in the case of 'lost signal' (ie if you cover the sensor so no light is falling on it)? The SSM3 gives a lost signal message, which SharpCap spots, so it would be nice to include that for the Airylab device too.

I suppose if there is nothing special on the output for lost signal then some sort of threshold on the raw signal measurement might work (below a certain level counts as lost signal), but I'm not sure what a good threshold would be.

cheers,

Robin

If I cover the sensor everything just gets zerod out.

[admin]

Ok, thanks, so what I will try is...

* If the value (voltage or seeing) is less than 0.01, assume signal lost, set seeing to 50 and voltage to 0.

cheers,

Robin

[midars]

Hello Robin,

I am using the latest SharpCap Pro (version 4.1.13724, 64-bit) together with an AiryLab Solar Scintillation Monitor (SSM).
The device connects on COM13 @ 115200 baud.
The original AiryLab application works fine and shows real seeing values.

In SharpCap, when I connect, the status is always No Signal.

Snímek obrazovky 2025-09-21 161238.png (22.92 KiB) Viewed 1436 times

I have captured the serial output for about 1 minutes and also made a screenshot. The device continuously sends lines like:

B0.96$
A11.59$
C2.49$

Would it be possible to add support for this data format in SharpCap? Please let me know if you need my log file or more details.

Thank you very much!

putty.log

(2.11 KiB) Downloaded 27 times

[admin]

Hi,

oops, my mistake - my code was expecting an '=' in the text read from the serial port (because I copy+pasted the code from the SSM3 implementation and didn't spot that it required an '=' to do anything). I will fix that for the next update.

cheers,

Robin