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
Section titled “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
Section titled “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
Section titled “Sequences”ARIS is designed to hand your ARIS plan to NINA’s Advanced Sequencer: build a sequence in ARIS — targets, filters, exposures — and push it to the NINA rig, where it lands as a NINA sequence and runs under NINA’s own sequencer, with NINA’s flip handling, safety logic, and recovery in charge.
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.
You don’t have to push sequences 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.
Requirements and installation
Section titled “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.
Which setup is right for you?
Section titled “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, weather, all-sky integration, and remote access. 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.