Introducing Ground Control for Night Sky Pi

Managing Night Sky Pi cameras by SSH gets old fast. Ground Control is a small web application that centralises management so it is easy to see what each camera is doing and to pull data without jumping onto individual devices. It is written with Spring Boot and Thymeleaf, with Bootstrap for the UI. The goal is a straightforward dashboard, not a flashy frontend. The code lives on Codeberg.

What Ground Control will do

• At a glance status: a dashboard that lists all cameras with key metrics like current activity, downloaded packages, and image counts.

• Manage cameras: add and remove cameras from a central place. Each camera uses a key in its properties so it can talk to Ground Control securely.

• Review observations: browse the observations that have taken place and inspect the associated data from a given night.

• Download and clean up: pull data from cameras for processing elsewhere, then run periodic clean ups that prune raw data after a few days or keep only downloaded sets.

This is the missing glue that makes operating multiple Night Sky Pi cameras practical day to day without friction.

Thanks for reading. If you have a neat pattern for securing device keys or a tidy way to visualise per camera metrics, share it so others can build on it.