T-O. Husser, J. Weingrill, L. Melzig, W. Bittner and S. Bahl
Most new telescopes nowadays come with electronics that are not much more than a black box for astronomers operating them. We are currently in the process of upgrading all our telescopes to new electronics based on Beckhoff hardware and PLC software that is developed by ourselves. This allows us to easily add features (both in hardware and software) that we need and directly fix bugs that otherwise would have to be handled by the manufacturer. We decided to make all our work public, so that other observatories can benefit from it.
L. Melzig, T-O. Husser and S. Bahl
We present the full electronics upgrade of our 20 year old telescope with industrial grade off-the-shelf components and demonstrate the implementation of our open-source runtime library BROTlib for an equatorial mounted telescope. In this paper the upgrade is laid out and key components are discussed. Furthermore, the open-source runtime and its functionality, as well as the corresponding frontend user interfaces are presented. We arrive at a telescope with versatile operation options, from fully manual to fully robotic operation through pyobs, greatly improved pointing and tracking capabilities, and a modular and easy to upgrade runtime.