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Thanks for the encouragement guys, it's going to be an interesting exercise!.
Hey Ed, thanks very much for all the info and the link, very interesting read!.
This dome is only 1.5m dia and pretty light!. Ive already cut the ribs out of 30mm ply so ill go with that, although your idea of straight cuts is good.
Im thinking now of covering with 3mm Australian hoop ply rather than gal or al, its light and easy to work with for me. Im not worried about leaks. Ill go by my past experience and use gorilla or t-rex tape over the segment joins, its thick, flexible, waterproof, strong and uses very aggressive adhesive. Ive used it before on external joints incl roofs and found it amazingly effective. Remember the dome is only 1.5m.
For control, i used to be an industrial automation tech, so this part i want to do myself as part of the challenge. I will do the control entirely with a PLC. Not software and ASCOM on a PC. Im familiar with programming them and they are made for this kind of application. dome control (the way I will do it) is much simpler than some of the machine automation projects ive designed in the past . I noticed on your link it used switched motor control. This is very crude, i will use variable speed motor controllers, it will be smooth and quiet, not stop-start. The syncing math in the link looks frighting !. Instead, I will use a variety of sensors to sense scope and dome position and provide closed loop real time control.
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