I'm looking into the possibility of making an LX-200 GPS a remote and robotic rig - and I know it will require some modifications. (It's easy to make an LX-200 work in the back yard because you're there to fix it...but 1,000 miles away?)

Yes, the rig will work just fine if the mount never has a run away slew to infinity, and the power is never interrupted, and the mount never loses position info.

But that's what Murphy's Law is all about...

What mods do I need for:

- limit switches to stop mount motion if if tries to move past 'safe limits' (e.g. +/- 7 hours from the meridian, -45 Declination, and a few degrees beyond the north pole)

- a way to allow the mount to find home after power up from a cold/dumb start (equatorially mounted, not alt-az)...or at least pointing 'assistance' to allow a remote user to get the mount to a known/reasonably accurate pointing state.

- anything else that will provide safety/fail-safe features, and good pointing info


As one example - it's easy to rig up limit switches to kill power and stop the mount...but now the mount is a dumb rock and it's lost position info. Are there connections/pins/jacks in the LX-200 wiring/circuitry that allow adding limit switches to disable mount motion, but keep mount power, and retain pointing info? (That sounds like a more elegant solution.)

Thanks in advance.