Smart Radio Telescope

Smart Radio Telescope is the mobile client for a self-built satellite-dish radio telescope with a motorised Azimuth / Elevation / Polarization mount. It connects over your local WiFi to the telescope's Raspberry Pi controller and turns a phone into its control station.

SKY VIEW AND RADIO MAPS * All-sky dome with stars, constellations and the dish's current pointing * Radio sky overlays from the Haslam 408 MHz and HI4PI hydrogen-line surveys, so you can see where the sky is bright at radio wavelengths * Object catalogue with the Sun, the Moon and radio targets such as Cas A, Cygnus X, W51, IC 443, M31 and 3C 273, each with a short description and its rise and set times * Tap a star or object to point the dish at it

RASTER SCANS * Drag a rectangle on the sky to map it * Choose the sweep axis, the pattern, the speed and the number of rows * Watch the map fill in as a live heatmap while the dish sweeps * Share the finished scan as an image

SOURCE TRACKING * Eight bright radio sources ready to observe: Cas A, Cyg A, Tau A, Vir A, Cen A, Sgr A*, Orion A and Fornax A * Shows which of them rise high enough at your site * One tap starts tracking; the mount follows the source across the sky

MOUNT CONTROL * Big STOP button, homing of all axes or one at a time, wake and sleep * Go to horizontal (Az/El/Pol) or equatorial (RA/Dec) coordinates, or track an RA/Dec position * Travel-range hints and warnings before a target would hit an endstop * Step buttons with a configurable step size * Virtual joystick for driving azimuth and elevation by hand: the speed follows your finger, the dish stops the moment you let go, and a red rim shows when an axis has reached its travel limit

LIVE TELEMETRY * Position, motion and homing state of each axis, pushed live from the mount * Endstop switch levels and the motor controller's temperature * Live radio signal chart with minimum and maximum * A clear banner when telemetry goes stale or the mount refuses a command

SYSTEM * Health of the Raspberry Pi: temperature, load per core, memory, disk and uptime, plus the firmware and backend versions * Clean shutdown of the Pi from the app, with a confirmation step * Works in portrait and landscape

HARDWARE COMPANION This is a hardware companion app: it does nothing on its own. It requires the matching open-source telescope hardware and Raspberry Pi backend, which are part of the same project. The app talks only to a device you run yourself on your own network — it contacts no external servers, and nothing it reads leaves that network. For development and classroom demos, the project also ships a simulator that stands in for the mount.

LOCATION While the telescope's backend knows no better position than its fallback, the app asks for the phone's location once per connection — and offers a button to ask again — and sends it only to that backend. The backend uses it for pointing, shows it to the telescope's other clients and writes it to its log; it does not keep it past a restart. The app itself stores no location. You can also enter the site by hand in the settings; a phone or GPS position takes precedence over a hand entry.

Built as a school demonstrator for radio astronomy.