Hello Gunter,

Sorry I did not reply to your previous message, with the COVID and my aging mother, the Christmas Holidays were a bit more ectic; but that's not our subject here. As far as the weather, we had mild and cloudy/rainy weather and on the only clear day, transparency was lousy so, no good astrophotography.

To answer your questions,

1) Roof control from KStars/Ekos/INDI: the roof can be unparked and parked from the buttons available with each application (dome conrtol in KStars, INDI dome driver tab, etc...). It even works, as it should, with the Weather Radio/Watchdog driver pair if weather is inclement.

2) Limit switches: I use a relay board that has four 10 amps relay outputs as well as four digital inputs (Tinysine TSIR04) and I modified the orifginal python script used to only drive relays, so it can now read the digital inputs. Those relay boards with inputs seem to be less used than the relay-only boards (Tinysine and Devantech make one). On a Raspberry PI or an ODroid (which I use), one could use GPIO pins to drive the relays as well as read the state of the limit switches; that would save some space as well as a USB port. I haven't looked into using the GPIO pins from my ODroid as I wasn't aware, at the time, that they could be used with Linux. I will likely consider using GPIO in a future version of the control electronics for the observatory, though.

Let me know if you have any more questions.

Wishing you all a wonderful COVID-free and cloud-free 2021!

Regards.

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