Remote Access

Remote access lets you run your rigs from anywhere: check the sequence from work, watch the guide graph from bed, get woken up only when something actually needs you. Same app, same screens — the rig doesn’t care whether you’re on the couch or three time zones away.

Note

Remote access is in beta. It’s field-proven on Raspberry Pi and other Linux rigs; see beta limits for what’s not covered yet.

How it works

Each paired rig opens its own secure, outbound-only tunnel to the ARIS cloud. The rig dials out; nothing ever dials in. That means:

• No port forwarding. You never open a port on your router.
• No router configuration. No static IPs, no DHCP reservations, no dynamic DNS.
• Nothing newly exposed on your network. The rig accepts no inbound connections from the internet.

All remote traffic is gated by your sign-in. You sign in with Google, Apple, or an email and password, and only the account that claimed a rig can reach that rig. Requests without a valid signed-in session are rejected before they touch the rig.

Setup is a one-time, two-minute pairing per rig: Pair for Remote Access.

Your fleet, from anywhere

Open app.arisastro.com (or the app) and sign in. The launcher shows your fleet: every claimed rig with live online/offline presence. Pick a rig and it opens — full control, not a read-only dashboard. Slews, captures, focus runs, sequence edits all work remotely exactly as they do at home.

One honest note on physics: controls and previews travel light, but full-resolution frame downloads are naturally slower over the internet than over your LAN. Plan to pull the night’s raw FITS files when you’re back home, and use the remote session for driving the rig and judging the previews.

At home, you connect direct

When you’re on the same network as a rig, ARIS notices and connects directly over the LAN instead of routing through the tunnel. It’s automatic — same launcher, same tap — just faster, because your frames aren’t taking a round trip through the internet to cross your living room. The tunnel is only used when you’re actually away.

Tip

On your own network — including a dark site with zero internet — you can always open the rig directly at http://<rig-name>.local:8080 (8080 is the default port; the pencil next to the rig’s name in Settings → Connection changes it). A rig flashed with ARIS Rig OS that you have claimed asks each phone, tablet and browser to sign in once with your account, so that nobody else on the same Wi-Fi can drive it. That one sign-in needs internet; after it, the device works offline. A hand-installed rig, a NINA rig and an unclaimed rig never ask. See Sign in.

Lock-screen alerts

Paired rigs push notifications to your phone, even on LTE with the app closed:

• Sequence complete, stopped, or failed — know the moment the night ends, either way.
• Deep stack ready — your overnight master is waiting in Files.
• Guardian alerts — severity-ranked safety notifications from the rig’s night watch, so a failed unattended sequence wakes you instead of tracking silently into the morning.

Lock-screen delivery works through the phone apps — iOS via TestFlight (beta invite) and Android via direct APK (beta).

Security posture

• Per-rig authentication. Every rig validates remote requests itself — reaching the tunnel is not enough; you need a valid session for the owning account.
• Your sign-in is the key. Only the account that claimed the rig can reach it remotely. There are no shared passwords or API keys to leak.
• Outbound-only. The rig never listens for inbound internet connections, so there’s no exposed service to scan or attack.
• Revocable. Settings → Connection → Remote access → Disable remote access takes the tunnel down, so the rig is reachable only on its own network; it stays linked to your account. Unlink this rig, in the same sheet, removes it from your account.

Beta limits

• Accounts are enabled per invite. If you see “This account isn’t on the beta list,” sign in with the account you were invited on, or contact us and we’ll enable it.

What’s next

• Pair for Remote Access — the one-time claim-code setup.
• Install ARIS on Your Rig — if your rig isn’t set up yet.