Automated alignment, tracking and stacking in a consumer astronomy instrument.
An instrument that removes the hardest part of astrophotography. It solves its own position from the sky, drives two axes to the target, and stacks frames live while the user watches the image resolve on their phone.
Plate solving, closed-loop motor control and live image stacking had to coexist on a battery-powered embedded platform, outdoors, in the cold, with only a phone as the interface.
We split the system across a real-time motion core and an application processor. Deterministic axis control stayed on an MCU while solving and stacking ran on Linux, connected by a framed serial protocol with defined failure behaviour.
A dual-processor architecture: an MCU for closed-loop motion, an application processor for imaging, with a custom mount driver board.
Astrometric plate solving with a compact star-field matcher, plus a learned model for frame quality scoring before stacking.
A mobile app over BLE and Wi-Fi Direct for setup, target selection and live view, with session capture stored on device.
Hardware
AI
Embedded
Apps