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

TL;DR

This paper presents the software infrastructure for the Dragonfly Spectral Line Mapper, a highly-distributed telescope system, detailing its communication protocol, web-based control, and autonomous operation features.

Contribution

Introduction of a comprehensive software stack including a Python communication protocol, RESTful web servers, and autonomous control algorithms for a distributed telescope system.

Findings

Successful implementation of the DCP for hardware communication

Effective orchestration of 120 units via REST APIs

Autonomous operation achieved through state machine control

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.