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, with a star-count chart 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”Getting startedWrite the SD card, power up, finish setup on your phone. Ten minutes.
Hardware & parts listEvery part in the reference rig, with links and prices — about $330 all in.
Cameras & lensesWhich Pi camera to buy, why the lens matters as much, and where ZWO stands.
Dew heaterAutomatic from a BME280 dewpoint. A Skylapse 12V heater ring is coming.