Welcome to AstroArch! Astrophotography on ArchLinux for Raspberry Pi, PC and mini PC (works also on Manjaro and all Arch derived distros)

<= Join us on discord!

Please find below some (hopefully) useful instructions, if you are here instead because you want to know how you can build this image from scratch, see this

• Quick video intro
• What Raspberry is supported?
• Kstars hours is not correct, how can I fix it?
• what are the passwords for the user and the hotspot?
• Download
• Flash the image to SD
• Useful commands
• On first boot - things to know
• Connecting via noVNC (browser)
• How can I boot from USB/SDD?
• List of available software
• How can I add a RTC to AstroArch?
• reporting problems
• For PC/mini PC running an ArchLinux derived distro (Manjaro, ArcoLinux, etc.)
• How to make a GPS dongle working?

What Raspberry version is supported?

AstroArch runs on any raspberry capable to run aarch64 OS, this means Raspberry Pi 4 and of course Raspberry Pi 5

Set timezone

Do not forget to set the right timezone! to do so run sudo timedatectl set-timezone Foo/Bar where Foo/Bar is something like Europe/Rome

Passwords

To save you some time, here the default password you will need for AstroArch:

• the user password for astronaut (which is the user used to login or for ssh) is astro
• the password for the AstroArch-XXXXXXX WiFi hotspot is astronomy

Use only the astro packages mantained for AstroArch on PC and mini PC

If you have an x64 distro based on ArchLinux on your PC and you just want to access the packages I mantain (kstas, phd2, stellarsolver, indi, indi libs and drivers) add my repo to your pacman.conf file (under /etc/pacman.conf) before the [core] section, the repo looks like the following

[astromatto]
SigLevel = Optional TrustAll
Server = http://astroarch.astromatto.com:9000/$arch

after that run sudo pacman -Sy && sudo pacman -S kstars phd2 indi-3rdparty-drivers stellarsolver

Download

Please use this link to download the latest astroarch gzipped img file => https://drive.google.com/file/d/111VLsfO-G9PiHvtZUz7PRrjngkYxyHPc/view

Flash the img to an SD

If you prefer a GUI, use balenaHetcher otherwise you can use the unix dd to flash it, and if you are using dd I think there is nothing I shall explain to you :)

Useful commands

The followings are some useful commands that you can run from the terminal so you don't have to deal with complicated stuff by yourself if you don't want to:

• update-astroarch => this command will update system packages (including kstars, indi, etc. if there are new versions) and will pull any fix for astroarch itself, additionally will update the astroarch configuration that may bring in more commands etc.
• astro-rollback-indi => rollback automatically indi to the previous version
• astro-rollback-kstars => rollback automatically indi to the previous version
• astro-rollback-full => rollback automatically indi and kstars to the previous version
• use-astro-bleeding-edge => install bleeding edge packages for Kstars and INDI
• use-astro-stable => install stable packages for Kstars and INDI

First boot

After you burned the .img file to your SD, you should be able to reach astroarch via VNC, however if you don't see the desktop or you can't connect to it this likely means that unfortunately your raspberry pi rev cannot boot the image. In this case please plug a monitor and report here the output! Once you are logged in the first thing you should do is update the system, open the terminal and type update-astroarch command

Connecting via browser (noVNC)

By default AstroArch will start a hostpot called AstroArch, to connect to that WiFi network use the password astronomy

noVNC is installed and it will start by default, if your pi is wired to your network you can connect to it with the follwing methods:

• http://astroarch.local:8080/vnc.html
• if the previous method doesn't work, find your raspberry pi IP, connect to it through your browser typing http://RASPBERRY_IP:8080/vnc.html

otherwise, if you want to connect to its hotspot, find the WiFi network AstroArch (the pass is astronomy) and type in your browser http://10.42.0.1:8080/vnc.html

Welcome to astro arch!

Adding swap

By default astroarch don't have swap, for prevent issues about memory space you can add a swap file and enable it, we will set swappiness to 10 don't use swap file if RAM space is ok. In this example we make a 2GB swapfile

sudo fallocate -l 2G /swapfile
sudo chmod 600 /swapfile 
sudo mkswap /swapfile
sudo swapon /swapfile
sudo echo "vm.swappiness = 10" | sudo tee -a  /etc/sysctl.d/99-swappiness.conf

Check swappiness

$ cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness
10

Check if Swap is enabled

free -h

Output should be something like this on Swap row :

$ free -h
               total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:           3.7Gi       1.4Gi       1.1Gi        88Mi       1.3Gi       2.3Gi
Swap:          2.0Gi          0B       2.0Gi

Make permanent swapfile on system

$ sudo echo "/swapfile   none    swap    sw              0       0" | sudo tee -a  /etc/fstab

Boot from external disk (USB, HDD, SSD, NVME)

If you want to use an alternative media to boot AstroArch, just flash the image to your support and it will work out of the box! No special steps are required

Software available

the following software will be available, by category

Astronomical

• Kstars 3.6.9
• phd2 2.6.13dev1
• indi libs 2.0.6 (all of them)
• indi drivers 2.0.6 (all of them)
• most of the widefield indexes for plate solving
• astromonitor (you never heard of it? Check it here https://github.com/MattBlack85/astro_monitor)
• AstroDMx (a capture software like FireCapture)

OS

• Konsole (terminal)
• KDE Plasma (Desktop environment)
• pacman (package manager, this is NOT debian based and pacman instead of apt is your package manager
• NetworkManager (to manage networks)
• Discovery (to install other packages)

Connectivity

• tigervnc (x0vncserver)
• noVNC

Browser

• chromium (like chrome, but without google tracking code)
• firefox

How to add a RTC

Adding a RTC to AstroArch is easy from version 1.6. First, wire your RTC to your pi, open a terminal and type sudo i2cdetect -y 1 you should see a similar table, take note of the number for the next steps

Now find the line dtoverlay=i2c-rtc in /boot/config.txt and modify it by adding a comma and the name of your RTC device, in my case for the ds3231 will be dtoverlay=i2c-rtc,ds3231

Reboot your Raspberry PI and if you type again sudo i2cdetect -y 1 you should now see a UU instead of the number, this means the kernel module for your RTC has been loaded correctly.

That's all you need! We just enabled automatic modules to setup the system time from the RTC if it's present! No more steps are required!

Reboot your PI and you should have the time automatically synchronized when it starts!

If you want to remove the RTC sync just drop ,xxxx from /boot/config.txt at line dtoverlay=i2c-rtc,xxxx

Using a GPS dongle

TODO

Reporting issues

AstroArch is actually in a stable state, however, should you find any issue please report them here https://github.com/MattBlack85/astroarch/issues this will help me tracking them and ship a fix for them

Quick video intro to AstroArch

https://github.com/devDucks/astroarch/assets/4163222/27bb0842-2db0-4db7-83e5-c513c8e02f5a