Grants related:
General
The Carlos Sánchez and IAC80 telescopes, known as TTNN and located in the Teide Observatory, are telescopes manually operated by astronomers (in person or remotely) through specific computer applications developed mostly in the 90's. These applications allow the control of the movement of the telescope (motors and encoders), as well as the integrated auxiliary mechanisms and subsystems, such as: dome, upper and lower hatches, mirror cover, weather station, alarms, GPS, seeing meter, etc. This control system resides in a control PC, which houses various cards to communicate with the different elements, and an auxiliary PC, connected through an RS232 line, which acts as a user interface. Although there have been some actions to modernize the system, much of it is still based on components that are now completely obsolete.
The objective of this project is therefore to improve the control system of these telescopes, so that the new software and hardware environments will have a modern, robust and versatile design, allowing a more efficient control, to be remotely operated and facilitating, later on, its automatic operation.