Install ARIS on Your Rig

A rig is the computer that lives at your telescope. It runs the ARIS backend and an INDI server, and it does the actual work: capturing frames, guiding, running sequences, stacking. The app on your phone or in your browser is a view into the rig — close it, and the rig keeps shooting.

This guide sets up a dedicated rig from scratch. If your imaging PC already runs NINA on Windows, skip to the NINA alternative at the bottom.

Note

During the beta, the installer and step-by-step instructions are provided with your beta invite. The outline below tells you what to expect and what the installer does to your machine.

What you need

• A Raspberry Pi 5 (recommended) or another 64-bit, Debian-based Linux machine. The installer targets Raspberry Pi OS and Ubuntu.
• A power supply that can sustain 5 V / 5 A on the Pi 5. Cameras, mounts, and filter wheels draw real current over USB — an underpowered rig browns out mid-night, and the symptoms (devices disconnecting and re-enumerating) look like driver bugs. The installer lifts the Pi 5’s USB current cap, but only your power supply can actually deliver the amps.
• Storage: an NVMe or USB SSD is strongly recommended over an SD card. A night of FITS subs plus stacking is disk-heavy, and the plate-solving star database alone is about 1.2 GB. SD cards work, but they are slower and wear out under this workload.
• Network: the rig and your phone or laptop on the same local network. Ethernet is most reliable; good Wi-Fi works. Internet is needed for the install itself and for remote access — imaging on the LAN works without it.
• Your equipment connected to the rig over USB: mount, camera, guide camera, focuser, filter wheel, rotator, flat panel — whatever you have.

Run the installer

1. Flash 64-bit Raspberry Pi OS to your SSD or SD card. Set the hostname to something you’ll recognize — it becomes the rig’s address on your network (a hostname of aris-pi means the rig answers at aris-pi.local). Enable SSH so you can reach the Pi without a monitor.

2. Boot the Pi, connect it to your network, and SSH in.

3. Copy the ARIS install bundle from your beta invite onto the Pi and run the setup script as root:

   sudo ./setup_pi.sh

   Expect a long first run — it updates the OS and downloads the ~1.2 GB plate-solving star database. Everything is logged, and the script is safe to re-run if it’s interrupted.

4. Read the summary the installer prints at the end. It lists everything that was installed and, if the rig is online, an 8-character claim code for remote access pairing. The code expires after 15 minutes — don’t worry if it lapses; you can mint a fresh one any time from the app.

5. Reboot. All ARIS services are enabled to start automatically on boot, and the Pi 5 USB power change requires a restart to take effect.

What the installer sets up

One script installs and configures the whole stack:

• The ARIS backend on port 8080, serving both the ARIS app and the rig API from the same address. There is nothing else to host — the rig is the server.
• INDI server and the full driver set — cameras, mounts, focusers, filter wheels, rotators, flat panels, GPS. Drivers load dynamically as devices are configured.
• PHD2 for guiding, run as a managed service.
• Plate solving: the ASTAP solver plus a Gaia-based star database, so solves run entirely on the rig with no internet.
• Siril, used for overnight deep stacking.
• mDNS discovery, so the rig announces itself as <hostname>.local and the app finds it automatically — no static IPs, no router configuration.
• USB reliability hardening: device rules, USB autosuspend disabled, and a fix for the Pi 5’s default USB current cap. These prevent the classic mid-night dropouts that plague USB-attached astro gear.
• Auto-start on boot for all of the above. Power-cycle the rig in the field and it comes back on its own.

Verify it works

From a phone or laptop on the same network, open:

http://<your-hostname>.local:8080

The ARIS app loads directly from the rig. From here, follow First Connection to apply an equipment profile and talk to your gear.

Tip

Bookmark the rig’s address on the devices you image with. On the LAN, ARIS never requires sign-in — a dark site with zero internet can’t lock you out of your own equipment.

Pair for remote access

The claim code printed at the end of the install is the one-time key that adds this rig to your fleet at app.arisastro.com, so you can reach it from anywhere — no port forwarding, no router changes. Pairing takes about two minutes: see Pair for Remote Access.

If you skipped it during install, nothing is lost. Open Settings → Remote Access in the app while on the rig’s network and generate a fresh code there.

Windows + NINA instead

If your imaging PC already runs NINA, you don’t need a Pi. The ARIS NINA plug-in turns the Windows machine into an ARIS rig: NINA stays your capture engine, and you plan, monitor, and control from ARIS on any device. See the NINA integration guide for setup.

NINA rigs support remote access too — pair one the same way, with a claim code. Remote access is in beta; some ARIS features are still Pi-only, listed in the NINA integration guide.