Roll off roof mount slewing protection

General
1

I have a roll off roof controlled by a skyroof controller with mount parked sensor. This sensor also cuts power to the roof motor if the scope isn’t parked, so the roof can’t close on the scope.
I also want to do something similar with the mount. ( an Atlas / EQ6 ) the mount is controlled via EQMOD and SGP. It is possible to slew the mount with the roof closed, I’ve done it trying to run a flats sequence. I would very much like this never to happen again. My initial thought was to use the roof opened switch to active a relay that in turn would enable 12VDC to the mount. But I don’t think SGP would like that since it would not have communication with the mount unless the roof was open. When I run flats SGP parks the scope first. This will close the roof since it is slaved to the mount. Once the roof moves off the closed switch I’ll loss comms with the mount and I suspect SGP wont like that and throw some kind of error.

How do you ensure that the mount can only slew when the roof is open?

Thanks,

-DaRiv

2

I designed my own roof, controller and driver and had the same concern. The answer was for my roof controller to monitor a proximity switch that is on when the mount is in the park position. If it moves off that, with the roof closed, it cuts power to the mount. This is outside SGP/ASCOM and is done by a small Windows app that I wrote to monitor things.

3

I plan to use the EQMOD E-Stop function. I have a parked switch and a roof open switch. If the roof is open, or if the roof is not open and the scope parked, the mount is enabled. Otherwise an E-Stop is trigger via gamepad interface.