Seestar for Home Assistant

A plug-and-play Home Assistant app that bridges one or more ZWO Seestar smart telescopes (S30, S30 Pro, S50) into Home Assistant over MQTT discovery. Point it at your scope and get live imaging telemetry — targets, stacking progress, plate-solve results, Alt/Az, mount and health — plus a live stacked-image preview, as auto-discovered entities. One HA device per telescope, zero hand-edited config files.

It also drives the scope: HA-driven control (sessions, goto, saved plans, settings, power) plus a live view camera, gated behind per-scope safety switches that default off — see Controls (Phase 2).

What it is

A single HA app that bundles everything you need:

• the seestar_alp ASCOM Alpaca driver (started for you, or reuse one you already run), and
• a Python telemetry bridge that taps the driver's event stream, computes Alt/Az, pulls the stacked preview image, and publishes MQTT discovery.

It runs zero-config against the official Mosquitto add-on and supports multiple scopes (one HA device each).

Architecture

One container, two s6-supervised processes:

• seestar_alp — the ASCOM Alpaca driver. Started only in bundled mode.
• seestar_bridge — the telemetry bridge (always running). It enumerates devices via Alpaca, taps the non-blocking event stream, computes Alt/Az, discovers each scope's address for the preview, and publishes MQTT discovery — one HA device per scope, namespaced by a stable slug of the scope name.

Seestar(s) ──Alpaca──> seestar_alp ──event tap──> seestar_bridge ──MQTT discovery──> Home Assistant
     └──────────────── stacked .jpg (preview) ───────────────────┘

Getting started (Home Assistant OS / Supervised)

New to this? The full, step-by-step walkthrough — with a first-run "what an idle scope looks like" tour — lives in seestar/DOCS.md → Getting started. The short version:

Before you begin, make sure you have:

• Home Assistant OS or Supervised, 2026.7 or later (the version this is developed and tested against; older builds may work but aren't verified). This is a Supervisor add-on; for HA Container / Core use the docker-compose.yml path below.
• The official Mosquitto broker add-on installed and the MQTT integration configured — the bridge auto-resolves the broker from there.
• A supported ZWO Seestar (S30, S30 Pro, or S50), powered on and joined to your home Wi-Fi in station mode via the Seestar app — not its default self-hosted AP mode, and on the same subnet as HA. Have its LAN IP ready (Seestar app or your router's DHCP list).

Then:

1. Add this repository — Settings → Add-ons → Add-on Store → ⋮ → Repositories:

   https://github.com/jaxzin/ha-seestar
   

2. Install Seestar for Home Assistant.

3. On the Configuration tab, add your scope under Telescopes (name + LAN IP) for bundled mode, or set External Alpaca driver (alpaca_host) to reuse your own seestar_alp. Start the app.

4. Watch the Log tab for the broker connection and discovered lines, then find the device under Settings → Devices & Services → MQTT.

On the first run, an idle scope that has never stacked shows a blank live preview and idle/unknown imaging fields — that's normal; they fill in once a stacking session runs. Note too that on firmware ≥ 7.18 the telemetry and preview work without an auth key, but device-state fields and controls need a challenge-response interop key configured in seestar_alp — see Firmware 7.18+ authentication.

See seestar/DOCS.md for the full options reference, the bundled-vs-external choice, the Mosquitto zero-config note, and troubleshooting.

Install (HA Container / Core, or a separate host)

If you run Home Assistant Container or Core, or want the bridge on a separate machine (e.g. a dedicated Raspberry Pi), there's no Supervisor — use the docker-compose.yml path. It runs the same bridge (and, in bundled mode, seestar_alp) from the same image, with MQTT and scope config provided explicitly. The compose file and the examples/ samples are commented end-to-end.

Dashboard card

For a purpose-built view of these entities, install the companion seestar-lovelace-card — a single self-theming Lovelace card (preview, target, stacking progress, pointing, mount and health) that you point at one scope with device: <entity-prefix>. It's HACS-installable (add that repo as a custom repository) and is the recommended way to build a Seestar dashboard.

No-HACS fallback: examples/stargazing.yaml is a copy-paste, stock-card starter dashboard that maps every published entity. Note that HA derives entity IDs from the entity name — the example explains how to adapt the prefix to your scope's name and read the exact IDs off the device page.

Licensing

This project's code is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. The bundled seestar_alp driver is licensed under GPL-3.0 and is included at arm's length (we talk to it over the Alpaca HTTP socket, as a separate process); see NOTICE and THIRD_PARTY_LICENSES.md for attribution and the preserved component licenses.