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 van Dokkum

doi:10.1117/12.3019506

25 July 2024 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 van Dokkum

Author Affiliations +

Proceedings Volume 13101, Software and Cyberinfrastructure for Astronomy VIII; 1310107 (2024) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.3019506
Event: SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation, 2024, Yokohama, Japan

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.

Conference Presentation

(2024) Published by SPIE. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.

Citation Download Citation

Imad Pasha, Seery Chen, Deborah Lokhorst, William P. Bowman, Zili Shen, Qing Liu, Evgeni I. Malakhov, Roberto Abraham, and Pieter van Dokkum "Software infrastructure for the highly-distributed semi-autonomous Dragonfly spectral line mapper", Proc. SPIE 13101, Software and Cyberinfrastructure for Astronomy VIII, 1310107 (25 July 2024); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.3019506

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