Software infrastructure for the highly-distributed semi-autonomous Dragonfly Spectral Line Mapper

Imad Pasha; Seery Chen; Deborah Lokhorst; William P. Bowman; Zili Shen; Qing Liu; Evgeni I. Malakhov; Roberto Abraham; Pieter G. van Dokkum

arXiv · 2406.15301

Software infrastructure for the highly-distributed semi-autonomous Dragonfly Spectral Line Mapper

Imad Pasha·Seery Chen·Deborah Lokhorst·William P. Bowman·Zili Shen·Qing Liu·Evgeni I. Malakhov·Roberto Abraham·Pieter G. van Dokkum

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Abstract

The Dragonfly Spectral Line Mapper (DSLM) is a semi-autonomous, distributed-aperture based telescope design, featuring a modular setup of 120 Canon telephoto lenses, and equal numbers of ultra-narrowband filters, detectors, and other peripherals. Here we introduce the observatory software stack for this highly-distributed system. Its core is the Dragonfly Communication Protocol (DCP), a pure-Python hardware communication framework for standardized hardware interaction. On top of this are 120 REST-ful FastAPI web servers, hosted on Raspberry Pis attached to each unit, orchestrating command translation to the hardware and providing diagnostic feedback to a central control system running the global instrument control software. We discuss key features of this software suite, including docker containerization for environment management, class composition as a flexible framework for array commands, and a state machine algorithm which controls the telescope during autonomous observations.

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BibTeX RIS

Imad Pasha, Seery Chen, Deborah Lokhorst, William P. Bowman, Zili Shen, Qing Liu, Evgeni I. Malakhov, Roberto Abraham, Pieter G. van Dokkum. 2024-06-21. Software infrastructure for the highly-distributed semi-autonomous Dragonfly Spectral Line Mapper. https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.15301

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