^RFRP Command

vining

I just got my first MVP-8400i and decided to give the animated Radar a try again since this has increased RAM capacity. I wasn't having any luck and didn't find anything new in the PI or Software History for the 8400i so I decided to check out the manual for the 8400i online and found this new command.

Syntax:
??^RFRP-<resource name>??
Variable:
resource name = 1 - 50 ASCII characters.
Example:
SEND_COMMAND Panel, ??^RFRP-DoplerRadarDFW??
Performs an update or prefetch on the resource named ?DoplerRadarDFW?, even if the
image is not in the current view.

With this new command inplace of the previous command I was using to force a refresh (^RFR) it now works rather well. If you look at the example code you can see that this usage was likely the pupose for its creation.

Now I'm a happy camper!

vining

Does anyone have any experience w/ the image cache commands or know how they can be used to make the radar animation smoother?

REBUILD_EVENT

what is this radar animation???

vining

You take a number of Dynamic images (URLs), in my current case 8 Nexrad radar screen shots and each image is taken say 15-30 minutes apart from each other. You download these images and play them back in an animation taking a few seconds to give the appearance of time lapsed storm/cloud movements.

This never used to work because there wasn't enough RAM memory available to load and refresh the screen fast enough to make this nice and smooth and continuous. There used to be blank time between the images loading, etc. Now it works pretty darn well and I am quite happy w/ the results! And apparently part of the problem was that the ^RFR command would only refresh the dynamic image if that image was presently being displayed (I never knew that) but this new command will refresh these images regardless. This is important because you want to refresh these images prior to displaying them so that they are already completely downloaded and available for display. The refresh rate in TPD4 is set to 0 so that you control and force the refresh in the code when appropriate.

I'm starting to work on Satellite images for visible, IR & water vapor animations (user selectable) presently to see how that looks.

REBUILD_EVENT

ok. the radar pics were "dynamic images" and changed with the ^RFR command from one state to another?

just an idea:
wouldn't it be possible to save the images on the ftp somehow and use a multistate button, for the animation using the ^ANI- Command?

or open several popups on top of each other each one with one picture?

maybe i'm saddling the horse from behind....

vining

^RFR refreshes the dynamic image if it is in view, ^RFRP refreshes the dynamic image regardless of weather it is in view or not and the image is stored on the TP. ^ANI is used to invoke the animation.

Trying to download the image as an animation runs or ftp it from the master or popping up pages is to slow to accomplish a smooth animation.

What I'm doing now works nearly perfect, at least as far as I'm concerned.

JohnMichnr

So how often do you run the refresh command?

vining

Right now I'm just sending the ^RFRP command once on a button push that opens the weather page. NOAA updates their radar & satellite images every 5 - 10 minutes or so and as yet I haven't put another ^RFRP in the code to refresh the images and get the lastest 8 pics should the customer leave the animation running for an extended period of time. That easy enough to do and I most likely will when I get everything else sorted out .

vining

Now I'm thoroughly confused! It appears the ^RFRP commmand isn't working properly or I'm seriously missing something.

My radar animation which uses the command apparently works fine, it updates on command and the animation is near perfect. Of course I'm just refreshing the same files.

My Satellite animation which as far as the amimation goes works fine until I needed to update the view to a different region. Using the ^RMF command in conjunction with the ^RFRP command I thought would work but files mostly just don't get refreshed except for the last file.

Because I was changing filenames using the ^RMF command I had no way of knowing if these commands were actually working. There just doesn't seem to be any means to verify if the filename was changed. Panel FTP would be nice! So I figured I'd just download the images to the master where I can verify content and filenames and I can download all the new images with changing filenames to fixed file names on the master so I wouldn't need the ^RMF. Set the URL/path/filename in the panel resource manager to the fixed filenames in the master and everything was supposed to work perfect. Well that part does its just when I send the ^RFRP command to refresh and retrieve the new pics it doesn't. Same old thing. I send an individual refresh command after each individual file is downloaded and then later when everything is complete another group of refresh commands and I get nothing.

Even if I use "control device" in NS2 and put a frame on the animation in focus using the ^ANI command and then ^RFRP-current frame image it doesn't work.

The bummer is that with all the pictures loaded on the TP the animation looks pretty cool and I have an overall Sat image of the US with 22 clear bubble buttons for the various regional SAT images that are available so I can select any specific area and if my images would refresh like they should with the ^RFRP command I could move on to important things instead of going around in circles chasing my own tail.

Note: Radar pics that work average 35k, the SAT pics that don't average 100k but I don't think this has any bearing on the problem.

I've attached the overall US Sat view with temp buttons to get the code working or should I say attempt to get things working.

vining

Apparently I was seriously missing something all though completely counter intuitive. It seem that the ^RFRP command works rather well if the dynamic images are given a refresh rate. Previously all my animated images for radar and satellite had a refresh of "0" so I could force it to refresh when appropriate. So, as a last resort I figured what the heck, why not try changing the refresh rates for the images. In my mind it doesn't make sense but most things in my mind don't. So I changed the values and downloaded to the TP, downloaded the program to the master again for a few subtle changes and the CF card corrupted, solid input/output, dip switch 1 no joy, great, just what I needed @ 10PM. This morning @ 6 AM I swapped out the NI-4000 ran the program and the images for the most part refreshed, so there's hope. Now I'll play with the send_command timing to see if I can get this to 100%.

I would have thought that a refresh rate of "0" would be the logical choice and ideally the setting the ^RFRP command was designed for. I gues "0" means don't refresh what so ever, although sometimes the in focus image did.

Is it supposed to be this hard? Detailed documentation would be so helpful!