Raspberry Pi All Sky Camera

Below is a collection of posts that discuss the development, construction, and operation of an open-source all sky camera for astronomy that is built on top of the Raspberry Pi computer paired with a Raspberry Pi HQ camera.

Software architecture for the Open Source All Sky Camera (OSASC)

2020-11-27

  • Initial architecture was written as a single python script
  • discovered that the pi didn’t have enough horsepower to do that
  • split script into multiple parallel processes that communicate using ZeroMQ messages
  • introduced some custom C code to interface with Python

Architecture

Software architectural diagram for the all sky camera
Software architecture for the controller component
Software architecture for the acquisition component
Software architecture for the conversion component
Software architecture for the imager component
Software architecture for the webserver

Open-Source All Sky Camera (OSASC) Objectives

2020-11-27

Before continuing my series on the Open Source All Sky Camera (now abbreviated as OSASC), I thought it prudent to step back and discuss what I hope to achieve with this project. As I have often imagined building a company that makes products for astrophysics, I’ve built some commercialization ideas into the project already.

Objectives

I would like a camera that can watch the stars, let me know when there are clouds, and detect bright satellites and meteors. I want the basic capabilities and design details of the resulting product to be fully open source, but reserve the option to make advanced capabilities or features available for purchase in the future. I would also like to have the ability to generate data products (cloud coverage data, meteor streaks, satellites streaks) that could be packaged and sold to third parties.

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