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.

There is an encoder coupled to the 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. Initial implementation controls dome motors through the Autoscope box with Opto 22 relays, but goal would be to just control the dome relays directly. 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 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.

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

Low-level functions are implemented in the APOAshDome.py module. An ASCOM Alpaca interface was implemented using the templates from the AlpycaDevice package.

Software is archived at https://github.com/holtzmanjon/APOAshDome