The 40 inch filter wheel is 6 slotted filter wheel, controlled over the network through NG protocal. It uses a stepper motor for motion and a hall effect sensor and encoder for homing and positioning respectively. It is controlled by an Arduino Ethernet and a LIN Engineering stepper driver.
The wheel uses NG Protocol developed by Steward Observatory. Its observatory ID is CSS40 and its SYSid is FW40. Each command or request requires a trailing newline.
| NAME | # of ARGS | DESCRIPTION |
|---|---|---|
| FNUM | 0 | Returns the current filter wheel number |
| MOT | 0 | Returns the motion status |
| Name | # of Args | Description |
|---|---|---|
| GOTO | 1 (fnumber) | Sends the filter wheel to the given number |
| DISABLE | 0 | Disables the stepper motor |
| ENABLE | 0 | Enables the stepper motor |
| SETHOME | 1 (Home Pos) | Sets the home position in offset counts first detecting the home sensor. |
| SAVEHOME | 1 (Home Pos) | Saves the given home position to the eeprom so it will use this value on start up. This will permanently change the home position!!! Use at your own peril!!! |
| HOME | 0 | Moves to the home positon. |
| STOP | 0 | Stops all motion |
You can find the arduino source code and an example python program for the network communication here .