Telescope is a Planewave PW1000. It is controlled through the pwi1m computer in the 1m dome, running Windows. pwi1m has two network interfaces. One connects to the telescope internal network on 192.168.10.XXX. pwi1m is 192.168.10.40, the Maestro controller on the telescope is 192.168.10.50, and the OTA controller on the telescope is 192.168.10.60.

Software control is through Planewave's PWI4 software. This runs under Windows on pwi1m, and provides a graphical user interface, as well as an ASCOM driver and also a custom Planewave HTTP API.

Normal telescope control is done remotely through the ASCOM interface, but interacting with PWI4 directly provide additional functionality. In particular, PWI4 incorporates its own pointing model software.

The telescope ASCOM driver should be registered through ASCOM Remote to make it available through an ASCOM/Alpaca interface.

Acquisition camera is connected to pwi1m via USB. PWI4 has the capability to connect to an ASCOM camera, and this is needed for doing pointing models.

Normal camera control is done remotely through the ASCOM interface. The camera ASCOM driver should be registered through ASCOM Remote to make it available through an ASCOM/Alpaca interface.

The dome has motorized upper and lower slit sections. Control of the upper slit and dome rotation is done through a custom relay box on the S side of the dome constructed by the Autoscope Corporation; the lower slit is controlled through a box on the N side, designed and constructed by Dave Woods. There is a manual/automatic toggle to allow dome control either through switches on the side of the boxes, or via remote control. Relays to control the dome motors are 24V relays and are activated by setting input control lines to ground. The 24V power is supplied externally. A watchdog is implemented in automatic mode such that +24V needs to be supplied or else dome shutter will automatically close.

There is an encoder (BEI Motion Systems Optical Encoder E206-1000-3G) coupled to the dome motor drive shaft.

There is a magnetic home sensor installed on the E side of the dome; the home position when the magnet on the dome lines up with the sensor places the slit at an azimuth of 80 degrees.

Dome control is implemented through software running on a Raspberry Pi, dome1m. . The Raspberry Pi has a RELAYPlates card with 7 relays, which control shutter direction, shutter power, dome direction, dome power, and watchdog reset. These relays connect the control lines to ground. The watchdog timer (Peltec) is set to drop power ~4 minutes after input power is turned off; hence, that relay should be triggered by cycling on/off every 3 minutes or so. Better to cycle instead of leaving it on in case some software failure occurs, but leaves relay energized.

4-pin connector J808A : Watchdog (dome box needs +24V or else shutter will close on Automatic)

Note that connectors J805A and J0806A, both 4-pin, go to a single 9-pin connector, as originally implemented in Autoscope control box.

connector J805A : Supplies power and ground to box, and relay for dome power (org yel blu wires)

connector J806A : Supplies (redundant?) power and ground to box, and relay for dome direction (brn red grn wires)

connector J807A : Supplies relays for shutter power and direction

The dome encoder gets +5V and ground from the RPi, and receives 5VDC signals from the A and B phases of the quadrature encoder. These are wired into RPi GPIO ports through a level converter that converts 5V to 3.3V. DC +5 and ground are connected to RPi power, A and B outputs are connected to level shifter input channels; level shifter output channels are connected to RPi GPIO pins. An independent ground from the cable shield may be very important, do not ignore!

The home sensor gets +5VDC and ground from the RPi, and receives a signal on a GPIO port that is normally low, but goes high when the home magnet is in proximity to the sensor.S

1. four-pin AMP to dome box
2. four-pin AMP to dome box
3. nine-pin AMP to dome box
4. four-pin AMP to home sensor
5. Ethernet cable
6. power cord for power supply
7. power cord for Raspberry Pi ?
8. ground wire
9. cable for lower dome

OLD Setup through Autoscope control box, which uses 5V Opto 22 relays.

An ASCOM/Alpaca driver was written to provide remote access to the dome control. The driver needs to be started when dome1m is rebooted.