Turn a Raspberry Pi into a shareable local view of the sky.
PiSky is a modular sky-observation platform. It runs three independent capabilities — an all-sky Camera, live Weather, and locally decoded Aircraft tracking — and a host can enable any one of them, or any combination. Everything is managed from a browser; nothing routine requires SSH.
Every station gets a public page for visitors and a private control interface for its owner.
- Docs: wiki.pisky.space
- Community and support: pisky.space/community
- Project home: pisky.space
Sky camera. Continuous all-sky capture with nightly timelapses, keograms and startrails, presented in a searchable archive.
Weather. Live conditions from Open-Meteo with no API key, or from a local WeeWX station. PiSky reads both, prefers your own sensors, and quietly fills what they cannot measure — cloud cover, visibility, UV, air quality — from Open-Meteo, labelling what it borrowed. Guided setup presets cover Ecowitt, Weather Underground clients and ObserverIP bridges.
Aircraft. Aircraft decoded by a receiver attached to your own Pi, shown on an animated radar scope over a map, with altitude colouring, track history and range rings. No external flight API and no internet connection required.
Archive and history. PiSky records a daily weather summary locally. Connect an optional database and it also keeps the intraday detail, which the archive draws as interactive charts. Dates from before you installed PiSky are filled from Open-Meteo's historical service and clearly labelled as reanalysis rather than passed off as your own readings.
Public data API. A read-only API at /api/v1/ so other sites can embed your
station's data. It publishes nothing beyond your visitor pages — readings you
hide stay hidden — and has no write surface at all.
Your station, your choices. Every weather reading has a switch controlling whether visitors see it. Station coordinates are withheld unless you publish them. Page wording, equipment details and photos are all editable in the browser.
| Hardware | Raspberry Pi 4 or 5 |
| OS | Raspberry Pi OS Bookworm, 64-bit |
| Storage | 32 GB or larger, good quality |
| Camera (optional) | An Allsky-supported ZWO or Raspberry Pi camera |
| Weather (optional) | Any station that can post to WeeWX, or none — Open-Meteo needs no hardware |
| Aircraft (optional) | RTL-SDR, or a Mode-S Beast serial receiver, plus a 1090 MHz antenna |
Debian 13 (Trixie) is not supported yet.
git clone https://github.com/DavidMGilbert/PiSky.git
cd PiSky
./install-pisky.shThe installer asks which capabilities you want, installs only what those need, and writes its own privileged helper so the rest can be managed from a browser.
Install specific capabilities without being asked:
./install-pisky.sh --with-weather --with-adsb --without-cameraSee what it would do, changing nothing:
./install-pisky.sh --dry-runWhen it finishes:
http://<your-pi>/— the public observatoryhttp://<your-pi>/admin/— the control interface
Open PiSky Setup first to set your location, choose a weather provider and configure a receiver. Full instructions are in INSTALL-PISKY.md.
cd PiSky && git pull && sudo ./update-pisky.shupdate-pisky.sh refreshes the parts of PiSky that live outside the checkout:
the privileged helper, the web server configuration and the scheduled units.
git pull on its own leaves those exactly as they were, which is how a station
ends up running current code against an old helper.
Re-running ./install-pisky.sh also works and is safe — it preserves your
configuration, public content and enabled capabilities — but it reinstalls
packages and reconfigures services, which an update rarely needs.
The installer also refreshes PiSky's privileged helper. Pulling new code without re-running it leaves that helper behind, and the interface will tell you so rather than failing obscurely.
| Document | Covers |
|---|---|
| INSTALL-PISKY.md | Full installation, receivers, weather stations, troubleshooting |
| PISKY.md | Feature detail, configuration files, data endpoints |
| NOTICE.md | Upstream authorship, licensing and attribution |
0.1.0 — first public release.
PiSky is usable and installable today. It is an early release: it has been built and tested against Raspberry Pi OS Bookworm on Pi 4 hardware, and wider validation across camera models, weather stations and receivers is ongoing.
Install it on a machine you can reformat rather than a production observatory, and please report what you find at pisky.space/community.
PiSky is released under the MIT Licence — see LICENSE.
PiSky builds on the Allsky camera project and includes GPL-3.0 code derived from RaspAP. Those licences, copyright notices and file headers are retained, and the combined work carries their obligations. NOTICE.md sets out the full attribution model.
Weather data from Open-Meteo is used under CC BY 4.0. Map tiles are © OpenStreetMap contributors. WeeWX is an optional, separately licensed dependency that PiSky interoperates with but does not include.
PiSky is led by David Gilbert — davidmgilbert.com