No terminal. Ever.
Write a card, plug it in, set it up on your phone. No config files, no account, nothing in the cloud. If there is no Wi-Fi to join, the camera serves its own.
Skylapse
Timelapse software for capturing the entire night sky, every night. Point a Raspberry Pi camera straight up and run the whole thing from your phone — live view, focus assist, timelapses and RAW files, with no terminal in sight.
What it does
Section titled “What it does”Built for Pi cameras
The HQ Camera / IMX477 above all — that is what Skylapse is developed and tested against. Boards the Pi cannot auto-detect can be declared from the setup screen. ZWO ASI USB cameras are supported second, best-effort.
Full-res JPEG + DNG raw
A full-resolution JPEG every frame, plus DNG raw on demand, on a schedule, or from a keeper button for when a meteor just went past.
Auto-exposure that tracks the sky
Day, night and twilight profiles from sun altitude, plus a manual mode for star-tracker rigs.
Nights browser
Scrub a whole night frame by frame to find the clear stretch. Download any frame as JPEG or DNG.
Focus assist
Live view with 1×–10× zoom into the full-resolution sensor image and a sharpness score to chase while you turn the ring.
Dawn timelapses
Rendered automatically every morning, with one-off length and quality overrides.
Survives your network
Falls back to its own Wi-Fi if your network disappears, and an access-point mode you can switch on by hand. Phone alerts over ntfy when capture stops — and when it recovers.
Capture, the web UI, and networking are three separate services, so a problem in one cannot stop the others writing frames.
Free forever
Section titled “Free forever”Skylapse has one hard rule: no cost to the maintainer, no cost to the user, ever. No native app (it is a PWA — no app-store fees to pass on), no cloud relay, no hosted service, no account. Everything runs on your Pi. Nothing in the project may create a recurring bill for anyone, and nothing may depend on a backend that could be shut down. MIT licensed, clean-room implementation.
Where to next
Section titled “Where to next”Parts listEvery part in the reference rig, with links, prices, and why each one is there. About $330 all in.
BuildStart to finish: write the card, wire the power, heater and sensors, set it up on your phone, switch the heater on, point it at the sky.
Using the appWhat every tab does, how the heater decides, phone alerts, storage and RAW, updates.
StoreThe Skylapse 12V heater ring, the one part made for this build.