Hi Gary - Mindful of the problems you have experienced I am basing my design on a stand alone system. Plan to use 3 computers, one for each of the mounts and 1 master controller with the cloudwatcher. Did some testing over the winter using 2/190 watt panels and 300 AH/24 Volt batteries - this ran the Gen 1 Atom with Cloudwatcher for all but the middle 5 weeks when there wasn't enough daylight to bring the batteries to float. The batteries were also manual switched to power the mount/camera/etc when required.
After winter I built and tested a system based on the D525 chip and the results were encouraging - encouraging enough to go ahead with the expansion of the observatory. The 2 new 24 volt/235 watt panels are cheaper and more low light efficient than the 24 volt/180 watt panels plus I have managed to locate another 300 AH/24 volt batteries and replaced the PWM Controller with a MPPT controller
I am now starting to test a N2800 board that is even more energy efficient and better suited to astronomy use -
Immediate plans are to now get all the systems bedding in and working reliably before the winter.
Cheers
Geof