Introducing Ground Control

I’ve started on the software to manage the Night Sky Pi cameras. I know that it’s extra functionality however, I recall that it was rather annoying to get the data off the cameras and know what they were up to without having to ssh into them.

This application is built using Spring Boot and Thymeleaf, with BootStrap being the front-end UI component. It’s not super new frameworks, but they work and I can throw a UI together quickly. Which to me is the most important thing, also considering that this application is just to control other systems and see at a glance what’s going on to me that’s good enough. The latest code can be found on Codeberg

The functionality of the application is as follows:

• Have a dashboard that shows all the cameras and metrics for them at a glance. This is so that I can work out what the cameras are currently doing and a snapshot of the system with the downloaded packages and image numbers.
• The ability to add and remove cameras from Ground Control so that I’m able to manage cameras within a central location. This will provide me with a key, that can be placed in the properties of the camera to communicate with ground control.
• There will be methods to view all the observations that have taken place and the data with those observations. This will allow me to inspect what happened during the night and maybe work out if there is a need to investigate further on the night’s data.
• There will be functionality to be able to download the data from the cameras for processing elsewhere. Along with clean-up jobs that after several days clean down the raw data, or limit it to only downloaded data.