I have a small observatory in my yard, and a CAT6 cable buried in the ground running from an ethernet switch in my home to the observatory. I was wondering if it is possible to have that cable send internet to the observatory, and also use that cable as a means for communicating with my observatory equipment from inside my house? There are motors to open the dome and also rotate it, and a telescope mount that is motor driven, all run by one piece of software. Sometimes I will use a laptop out there for control, and sometimes I will use my PC inside.
Would I be able to use my inside computer to control the automation of the observatory and communicate with the equipment, while also simultaneously sending an internet signal to the building when I’m out there supervising it/observing? Or do I need to lay another cable?
Thanks!
I have a telescope that uses a CAT 5 crossover cable, but it is NOT ethernet. Two pins are 12 volt power, and other pins tell the motors which way to slew, and report back to the controller how far they’ve traveled.
Look at the pinout, but unless it’s talking ethernet, you’ll need two cables to do both.
Ethernet cables do not “sort out” and treat data communications differently by any kind of categorization. They will transmit any kind of valid data, without discrimination of the source. Internet traffic is not special and does not need to be treated any differently. It just happens to come from farther away.
So you can use your one cable to have the observatory communicate to any amount of devices, from your home or from the Internet, as long as your network topology and settings are configured to do so. Most likely, yours already is. You can test this by “pinging” your observatory equipment’s IP Address from the PC controller inside your home.
Put a cheap 4-port gigabit ethernet switch at the observatory end of the existing cable then if the switch in the house is LAN-connected that new observatory switch will provide wired internet access too. Then plug a patch cable from the new switch to your equipment’s original ethernet connection port to run it, too.
Plug a wifi AP into the observatory switch for added wireless access there, too.
How does your observatory control work? Is it using proprietary analog signals on that Cat6 cable, is it using RS-232 serial, is it running IP, is it using a non-IP protocol but still ethernet?
By the sounds of it, yeah, just pop a switch on the other end and a cable from that to the observatory then use any of the other ports on the new switch for any other devices you want on the network. If I understand what you’re saying it’s all IP based, so it should work transparently.
As others said: if it speaks also Ethernet then you can mix. If it just uses Cat cable and RJ45 plugs you can‘t mix.
Hope the observatory is never struck by lightning.