Ad Astra Observatory

Armed with a good night’s sleep, I was able to figure out a way to quickly fix the home switch setup in the test circuit.

Essentially, I had put a current-limiting resistor on the 5v rail, to protect the encoder. However, the home switch needed the full 5v, so I moved the resistor from the test circuit into the terminal block (which sits between the two RJ jacks), hooked the switch to 5v, the encoder to the post-resistor positive rail, and held my breath.

The Jr. Astronomer dropped in to test the circuit, and we were both delighted and relieved to see that now, in addition to the blinky encoder lights, we have an LED for the home position, too! Most excellent.

The test circuit is still on the breadboard; it’s probably worth putting into a permanent case.

I need to get the RJ jacks installed into an outlet box, so that I can call the wiring done for the azimuth components.

To connect to the dome controller, I will need a cable with RJ12 at one end, and a dome control interface (3 pins for digital inputs, 2 for power) at the other. I will pull the power from the circuit that has the relays attached; I need to find a place to add the big current limiting resistor (might be able to just replace the one in the home switch junction box?).