Unistellar Telescope Data Downloader

Reliable command-line tool to download FITS, TIFF, or PNG observation data from Unistellar telescopes (eVscope, eQuinox, Odyssey) over WiFi.

Why?

The official Unistellar web UI at http://192.168.100.1 bundles all selected observations into one giant zip download. On the telescope's Raspberry Pi WiFi, this frequently fails mid-transfer — especially for large science observations with thousands of FITS frames.

This tool fixes that by:

• Downloading one observation at a time — a failure doesn't lose the others
• Auto-retrying on WiFi drops — up to 10 attempts per observation
• Concurrent event polling — required by the telescope's backend to stream data (the key discovery that makes this work)
• Validating downloads — verifies zip integrity, won't skip corrupted files
• Canceling stuck downloads — automatically clears stale telescope state before starting

Install

pip install unistellar-data-downloader

Or clone and run directly:

git clone https://github.com/vamshikesireddy/unistellar-data-downloader.git
cd unistellar-data-downloader
pip install .

Usage

1. Connect your laptop WiFi to the telescope (the network named like eVscope-XXXX or UNI-XXXX)
2. Run:

unistellar-download

That's it. The tool will:

• Connect to the telescope at 192.168.100.1
• List all observations stored on the telescope
• Let you pick which ones to download and in what format
• Download each one individually with progress and retry

Options

# Just list what's on the telescope
unistellar-download --check

# Download everything as FITS without prompting
unistellar-download --all --format fits

# Download to a specific folder
unistellar-download --output ~/my_observations

# Cancel a stuck download on the telescope
unistellar-download --cancel

Alternative ways to run

# As a Python module
python -m unistellar_downloader

# Directly (without installing)
python unistellar_download.py

Supported Telescopes

Works with any Unistellar telescope that uses the Direct Data Download web interface at http://192.168.100.1:

• eVscope / eVscope 2
• eQuinox / eQuinox 2
• Odyssey / Odyssey Pro

All models run the same evsoft firmware and expose the same API.

How It Works

The telescope runs a Raspberry Pi with a web server. The official web UI is a Vue.js app that communicates via:

Key discovery: The telescope backend will not stream zip data unless a client is actively long-polling /api/event. The browser's Vue.js app does this automatically. This tool replicates that behavior with a background EventPoller thread, which is why it works where a simple requests.get() to the zip URL would hang and return 502.

Requirements

• Python 3.9+
• requests (installed automatically)

License

MIT