NINA Integration

If your imaging PC runs NINA, you don’t have to choose between it and ARIS. The ARIS NINA plug-in turns the Windows machine into an ARIS rig: NINA keeps running your equipment as the capture engine, and ARIS gives you planning, monitoring, and control from any device — phone, tablet, or browser.

How it works

The plug-in runs inside NINA on the imaging PC. Once installed, the PC advertises itself on your network exactly like any other ARIS rig: it appears in discovery, joins your fleet dashboard next to your Raspberry Pi and other rigs, and reports online/offline presence. There is no separate server to run — NINA with the plug-in is the rig.

To ARIS, the NINA rig is just another rig in the fleet: same rig picker, same dashboard, same one-tap switching. The difference is under the hood — device control and sequencing run through NINA rather than the ARIS backend, which is why the feature set differs (see the note below).

What a NINA rig can do

• Live status — equipment state, current activity, and session progress from the ARIS dashboard, on any device in the house or yard.
• Capture — trigger captures and watch results arrive in ARIS while NINA drives the hardware.
• Filter slots — edit filter names and colors in ARIS; the changes persist into your NINA profile, so both applications agree on what lives in the wheel. See Filters & Calibration Frames.
• Plan and monitor anywhere on your network — build target plans on the couch with the Plan screen’s sky atlas and check on the night from your phone, while the Windows PC stays out at the scope.

Sequences

On a NINA rig the Sequencing screen runs your plan in NINA’s Advanced Sequencer. Build the night in ARIS — targets, filters, exposures — and tap Start: ARIS builds it as a NINA sequence and NINA runs it, with NINA’s own flip handling in charge. If a sequence was loaded in NINA, ARIS saves a copy of it first. From then on you follow the run in ARIS and pause, resume, or stop it from any device, as on any other rig.

This keeps a clean division of labor: ARIS is the planning and monitoring surface, NINA remains the execution engine you already trust on that machine.

The Library on a NINA rig also lists the sequence files in NINA’s own sequence folder: load one into Sequencing, or run it in NINA exactly as it is saved.

You don’t have to start nights from ARIS at all, of course — if you prefer building nights directly in NINA’s sequencer, the plug-in still earns its keep as the way to watch that night from your phone instead of standing at the Windows machine.

Note

NINA rigs currently run a subset of ARIS features. Several features run in an ARIS backend that the plug-in starts beside NINA on the same PC: Rig Guardian (its holds, guide-star reacquisition, and the dawn end), SkyNode cloud detection, the global layer of the weather forecast, live and deep stacking, Go Live, and GUPPI. The plug-in download does not include that backend yet, so on a new install these stay off. The Guardian’s safe state on failure and GUPPI playbooks are not on NINA rigs at all yet. Parity is in progress; the gap closes plug-in release by plug-in release.

Requirements and installation

• NINA 3.x on the Windows imaging PC.
• The ARIS plug-in, which ships with the ARIS beta — beta testers receive the plug-in and install instructions with their invite.
• The imaging PC and your ARIS devices on the same local network.

After installing the plug-in and restarting NINA, the rig appears in ARIS discovery automatically — select it like any other rig and connect. No port forwarding, no manual IP entry needed on a normal home network.

The plug-in serves ARIS on port 8080. If another program on the imaging PC already uses 8080, change the port in NINA under Options → ARIS (the ARIS web port field at the top) and select Apply. Windows asks once for permission to use a new port.

Which setup is right for you?

• You already have a tuned NINA machine at the scope — add the plug-in and gain multi-device planning and monitoring without changing what executes your nights.
• You are building a new rig — a Raspberry Pi or other rig computer running the full ARIS backend gets you the complete feature set, including Guardian, the global weather forecast, and SkyNode. See Equipment Setup.
• You have both — they coexist in one fleet. The dashboard shows your INDI rigs and NINA rigs side by side, and you switch between them in a tap.