ORION SMART CAMERA SYSTEM

Since high school, one of my favorite hobbies has been astrophotography. Astrophotography is, in short, capturing images of objects in the night sky such as nebulae, galaxies, and star clusters. Though I enjoyed the hobby, my lack of equipment (and lack of funds to buy equipment) made the capture process slow and tedious.

Astrophotography is by nature a very involved and very technology-heavy hobby. Camera setup, calibration, and focusing can take up to take up to an hour to complete, and equipment must be regularly monitored during a photoshoot to ensure proper functionality and focus.

My first prototype (2023) ran on a Raspberry Pi 4 and allowed for basic camera control and settings adjustments. The user interacted with the UI via a keyboard.

Perhaps the most useful UI features of v1.0 was that every time a user changed a camera setting such as exposure length, the device would calculate an “estimated time to completion”. This significantly simplified the planning process. This was taken a step further in v2.0.

In the years following, several major improvements were made, eventually culminating in Orion 2.0, the current version.

Notable changes include:

• Switch from Raspberry Pi 4 to RPi Zero to limit power consumption

• Replacing keyboard input with a simple joystick

• Camera error monitoring and notification (such as low battery, lost connection, etc.)

• Ability to fine-tune camera focus directly on-device

• Introduction of project management features

• Design of a 3D-printed housing for the device and joystick