Trouble getting started!

[wjfinniganjds]

I'd like to start by saying I love your program. With it I have been able to automate a 15 minute process that will give us back that time each day and hopefully make the process more reliable.

I have a couple of questions/problems I was hoping for a little help with.

I think I have the scheduler setup correctly, and autologin setup correctly(but something isn't working). But when I set it to fire at a particular time it doesn't seem to start. I don't understand why.

I can't seem to get the scheduler to fire at all. This is confusing for me because I have had it fire off one night, and it worked fine for me on the eval copy.

Second my macro uses several images that are VERY close to identical so I've pumped the number of random pixels up very high. Is there any way to just make it match all the pixels? If so what kind of performance hit would this cause?

I've found I have to put a 5 second pause in before hitting the image position command. Is that normal?

-Stuck on the starting line

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[wjfinniganjds]

After a little more checking today it appears that my macro scheduler service was setup as manual.

I'm not sure if that was by design, but when I toggled that from manual to automatic things started working perfectly.

I love this program.

Also, I should let you know that I had previously toggled it on via the tools option selection.

-John

-Oh yes I think the problem might also have been related to the recovery option. If you are trying to recover and start immediatly if schedule was missed had been my option but I've changed that to run at scheduled time.

[gdyvig]

Hi John,

Second my macro uses several images that are VERY close to identical so I've pumped the number of random pixels up very high. Is there any way to just make it match all the pixels? If so what kind of performance hit would this cause?

If you set the system variable FIP_SCANPIXELS to a value higher than the number of pixels in the needle image, it will randomly match all but a few of the pixels. For a 20x20 image, it will randomly search for a match a pixel 400 times, but because it does not check for duplicates it will usually miss some. I did a test on a small image and found that it did a good job if the images were different by 3 or more pixels. In your case with nearly identical images, I would put your FindImagePos in a loop and run it hundreds or thousands of times to see if it always finds the correct image.

You can check for NumFound and the x,y coordinates of the first found image to see how reliable it is. Or you can do the probability math.

I have not checked for really large images, but for small images up to a couple thousand pixels the performance has been very adequate for my purposes.


By the way, an enhancement request has been submitted to provide an option to check every pixel.

http://www.mjtnet.com/usergroup/viewtopic.php?t=5670

I've found I have to put a 5 second pause in before hitting the image position command. Is that normal?

It may be it takes that long for the application image to get painted and stabilize. You can put int a smart wait like WaitScreenImage so the script will not wait longer than necessary.


Gale

[wjfinniganjds]

OK.

Last night when I went home I had tested the auto login and the scheduler and they were both working fine. However last night none of my macros fired off AGAIN! This is been a problem for about a week now.

Honestly I have no idea why it worked last night when I left but it is no longer working now. I tried the same tests from yesterday, but today they aren't working....

Anyone have any idea how/why this is happening?

-John

[wjfinniganjds]

So,

I figured when I reinstalled and everything was working fine yestereday I was out of the woods but again last night things didn't fire off. So Frustrating.

Today I took down my antivirus and tried again and it worked just fine. It appears that mcaffee blocks the macro scheduler program somehow.

I'm going to do a little addtional testing but that is what appears to be the problem.

I've changed macro scheduler service back to manual Please let me know if that is wrong.

I'm so confused. I rebooted my computer a couple of times trying to replicate the problem where the scheduler wouldn't work. I'm trying it w/o using the auto login feature. If the scheduler kicks off at all the auto login seems to work. However the scheduler doesn't always seem to kick off. It is so very frustrating.

Does anyone have a list of the required services? I just can't seem to nail down what is causing the problem and I don't want to come in tomorrow morning to find that the macros that are the interface between our accouting and web software have again failed to fire.

[gdyvig]

Hi John,

What OS are you using? The manual says AutoLogon is not supported under Vista. Some XP updates may disable it as well. The Scheduler is an interactive service which no longer exists under Vista. It can also become inoperative if security is too tight. Do a search on "AutoLogon". The first couple hits will tell you the issues and some actions you might try.

Did you test AutoLogon exactly they way you used it when it failed?

This may help:

http://www.mjtnet.com/blog/2006/03/20/ ... -desktop/


I also use a Microsoft PowerTool called TweakUI to do the autologons.


Gale

[wjfinniganjds]

I use XP I run Mcaffee total protection and logmein on this PC and that's about it.

Thanks Gale your help is appreciated.

-John

[wjfinniganjds]

Well,

Not sure what the difference was, the only thing that I can figure is that shutting down the virus protection told it I wanted to allow that program to run. Because last night everything fired flawlessly. A couple of slight tweeks on Wait Window variable and soon I won't have to check on it!

-John