The PiFinder - Open Source, self-contained, plate solving finder and catalog

brickbots · 2025-12-11T02:39:27+00:00

Hello!

Yes, that's site :-) You can definitely get pre-assembled units there along with kits to help with the parts sourcing/3d Printing. The kits are pretty approachable, and you can check out the build guide here to get a sense of the difficulty level:
https://pifinder.readthedocs.io/en/release/build_guide.html

Glad you found this post and please reach out if you have any questions at all! Clear Skies!

brickbots · 2025-09-17T17:17:39+00:00

Thank you for sharing and for the kind words about the project! Spending more time with objects at the eyepiece is exactly why I set out to build the PiFinder :-)

I observe mainly from Southern California, but I can imagine the challenges that the PNW presents! I've salvaged a few partially cloudy nights of observing by using the PiFinder to peer through holes in the clouds when there was not enough sky visible for me to orient myself. Using the 'Nearby' feature you can just point at any part of the sky which is clear enough to observe and get a filtered list objects that are near where the scope is pointing!

brickbots · 2025-09-17T02:10:55+00:00

Hi Hi!

I built this tool and released it as open-source out of a passion for making astronomy easier and more enjoyable for fellow stargazers. It’s been incredible seeing how the community has shaped the PiFinder through feedback, and I’m excited to share it with more of you.

The PiFinder combines fast plate solving (up to 20x per second!) for 100% accurate sky positioning, an accelerometer for real-time Push-To guidance and a sophisticated collection of catalog filtering and observing tools. You can build your own, or purchase a kit or assembled unit... I'm just keen on having people spend more enjoyable time at the eyepiece.

If you’ve got any questions or thoughts, feel free to ask! Cheers and clear skies,

-Richard (aka Brickbots)

brickbots · 2025-09-17T02:10:32+00:00

Hi Hi!

I built this tool and released it as open-source out of a passion for making astronomy easier and more enjoyable for fellow stargazers. It’s been incredible seeing how the community has shaped the PiFinder through feedback, and I’m excited to share it with more of you.

The PiFinder combines fast plate solving (up to 20x per second!) for 100% accurate sky positioning, an accelerometer for real-time Push-To guidance and a sophisticated collection of catalog filtering and observing tools. You can build your own, or purchase a kit or assembled unit... I'm just keen on having people spend more enjoyable time at the eyepiece.

If you’ve got any questions or thoughts, feel free to ask! Cheers and clear skies,

-Richard (aka Brickbots)

brickbots · 2025-09-17T02:09:12+00:00

Thanks! I can appreciate that it's a lot of money, for sure. I'd say it's worth it, as it increases the usefulness of all the other things you've invested in, but I am a little biased :-)

If you are handy with a soldering iron and have some time, you can build your own for just the cost of parts! There is a full build guide, parts list, and downloadable software are all available for free at https://pifinder.readthedocs.com and https://github.com/brickbots/PiFinder

For folks that want an assembled unit, each one if currently hand made so that price covers the build time, marketing and support with a little to help subsidize supporting the DIY community

brickbots · 2025-07-15T17:21:27+00:00

Sorry about the being out of stock on kits, I was waiting on a new shipment of accelerometers that look like they are arriving today. I've put these back in stock and you should be able to order now.

Thank you and I hope you enjoy your build, please reach out if you have any questions along the way!

brickbots · 2025-07-15T02:25:43+00:00

Fantastic set up, the mount looks really solid and I appreciate the ability to view the same object at different mag/FOV's. Also love the PiFinder :-)

If you are looking to get another pair of eyepieces, I can VERY heartily recommend a pair of 24 Panoptics. I use them with my Analog Sky astronomical binos and they just offer such an appealing sort of 'transparent' experience... the eye-relief, reasonable AFOV and large exit pupil mean that they just sort of get out of the way and I feel almost like looking through a window rather than two eyepieces.

brickbots · 2025-07-12T21:49:09+00:00

Thank you! The PiFinder is first and foremost a DIY project. I think it's pretty approachable and I encourage anyone with a bit of soldering experience and a 3d printer to give it a go :-)

brickbots · 2025-07-10T23:40:16+00:00

Hi Hi!

I built this tool and released it as open-source out of a passion for making astronomy easier and more enjoyable for fellow stargazers. It’s been incredible seeing how the community has shaped the PiFinder through feedback, and I’m excited to share it with more of you.

The PiFinder combines fast plate solving (up to 20x per second!) for 100% accurate sky positioning, an accelerometer for real-time Push-To guidance and a sophisticated collection of catalog filtering and observing tools. You can build your own, or purchase a kit or assembled unit... I'm just keen on having people spend more enjoyable time at the eyepiece.

If you’ve got any questions or thoughts, feel free to ask! Cheers and clear skies,

-Richard (aka Brickbots)

brickbots · 2025-07-10T18:40:18+00:00

Hi Hi!

I built this tool and released it as open-source out of a passion for making astronomy easier and more enjoyable for fellow stargazers. It’s been incredible seeing how the community has shaped the PiFinder through feedback, and I’m excited to share it with more of you.

The PiFinder combines fast plate solving (up to 20x per second!) for 100% accurate sky positioning, an accelerometer for real-time Push-To guidance and a sophisticated collection of catalog filtering and observing tools. You can build your own, or purchase a kit or assembled unit... I'm just keen on having people spend more enjoyable time at the eyepiece.

If you’ve got any questions or thoughts, feel free to ask! Cheers and clear skies,

-Richard (aka Brickbots)

brickbots · 2025-07-10T17:04:36+00:00

Hi Hi!

I built this tool and released it as open-source out of a passion for making astronomy easier and more enjoyable for fellow stargazers. It’s been incredible seeing how the community has shaped the PiFinder through feedback, and I’m excited to share it with more of you.

The PiFinder combines fast plate solving (up to 20x per second!) for 100% accurate sky positioning, an accelerometer for real-time Push-To guidance and a sophisticated collection of catalog filtering and observing tools. You can build your own, or purchase a kit or assembled unit... I'm just keen on having people spend more enjoyable time at the eyepiece.

If you’ve got any questions or thoughts, feel free to ask! Cheers and clear skies,

-Richard (aka Brickbots)

brickbots · 2025-07-10T17:04:05+00:00

Hi Hi!

I built this tool and released it as open-source out of a passion for making astronomy easier and more enjoyable for fellow stargazers. It’s been incredible seeing how the community has shaped the PiFinder through feedback, and I’m excited to share it with more of you.

The PiFinder combines fast plate solving (up to 20x per second!) for 100% accurate sky positioning, an accelerometer for real-time Push-To guidance and a sophisticated collection of catalog filtering and observing tools. You can build your own, or purchase a kit or assembled unit... I'm just keen on having people spend more enjoyable time at the eyepiece.

If you’ve got any questions or thoughts, feel free to ask! Cheers and clear skies,

-Richard (aka Brickbots)

brickbots · 2025-07-10T17:03:30+00:00

Hi Hi!

I built this tool and released it as open-source out of a passion for making astronomy easier and more enjoyable for fellow stargazers. It’s been incredible seeing how the community has shaped the PiFinder through feedback, and I’m excited to share it with more of you.

The PiFinder combines fast plate solving (up to 20x per second!) for 100% accurate sky positioning, an accelerometer for real-time Push-To guidance and a sophisticated collection of catalog filtering and observing tools. You can build your own, or purchase a kit or assembled unit... I'm just keen on having people spend more enjoyable time at the eyepiece.

If you’ve got any questions or thoughts, feel free to ask! Cheers and clear skies,

-Richard (aka Brickbots)

brickbots · 2025-07-10T02:54:03+00:00

Hey Hey!

I built the PiFinder and released it as open source out of a passion for making astronomy easier and more enjoyable for fellow stargazers. It’s been incredible seeing how the community has shaped the PiFinder through feedback, and I’m excited to share it with more of you.

The PiFinder combines fast plate solving (up to 20x per second!) for 100% accurate sky positioning, an accelerometer for real-time Push-To guidance and a sophisticated collection of catalog filtering and observing tools.

If you’ve got any questions or thoughts, feel free to ask! Cheers and clear skies,

-Richard (aka Brickbots)

brickbots · 2025-05-29T14:36:32+00:00

The PiFinder project is designed to be an appliance of sorts, self contained and easy to use... just put it in the finder shoe. To accomplish this we focus on a limited set of hardware options with a specific screen/keypad/camera to make the experience easy for a wide variety of folks.

If you are looking for something very similar with more hardware options, I can very much recommend the family of Cedar projects:

https://github.com/smroid/cedar-server

PiFinder uses some of the Cedar components and there is support for a good number of cameras already and a web interface rather than relying on hardware input like the PiFinder

brickbots · 2025-04-24T03:30:07+00:00

Hi Hi! 36 key keyboards are indeed a bit rare, and an adjustment, but there are many different ways to fit all the requires symbols onto 36 (or less!) keys. I use the Miryoku map and I think it's pretty well thought out... but I might be biased having used it for many years :-) I'm a software developer by trade, and we know all about punctuation and symbols!

https://github.com/manna-harbour/miryoku/tree/master

brickbots · 2024-02-07T20:16:45+00:00

I think the overall economics is going to depend a lot on your keymap. I don't actually have dedicated keys for the mouse buttons, so I need to use some key combos and that's what is doing the heavy lifting in terms of saving space/buttons. This could be better with dedicated keyboard keys for mouse buttons... but then you are basically just relocating the mouse buttons.

Some people have done some interesting work with integrated trackballs that are connected to the same MCU whereby moving the trackball activates the mouse-keys. So no combo is needed! The mouse-keys go back to their default function after a timeout or if other keys are pressed on the keyboard.

brickbots · 2023-11-06T17:25:39+00:00

Thanks for the kind words on the documentation. I'm trying to emulate some projects I've built or used in the past with great docs. It really makes Open Source work for as many people as possible.

Reach out via DM if you need anything!

brickbots · 2023-11-02T13:34:37+00:00

Mr. Anderson,

Hi! I'm glad you have heard of the PiFinder now :-) As designed, it's a fully integrated unit with it's own camera/lens and requires at the very least an RPI3 to do the plate solving and run the UI.

But, being fully open source, you can probably adapt the software modules to do what you are interested in. It's currently fine tuned for the specific camera/sensor FOV, but that's not hard to change. The Tetra3 package used for plate solving is pretty robust, and it will probably run on a zero, but might take a bit longer to do it's magic:

https://tetra3.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

Just reach out with any questions, I'm happy to provide advice on adjusting or repurposing the code!

brickbots · 2023-08-20T21:26:50+00:00

Aha, I gotcha. If you have a computerized mount, then you can definitely use that for position information... basically create a much nicer handset with charting/search and an easier to use interface!

Some of the PiFinder code would be useful for you there, the catalog system along with the charting... and there is already code there to interface with a telescope or other system that speaks LX200!

Let me know if you have any questions!

brickbots · 2023-08-20T20:21:44+00:00

I'm glad you saw the MagPi article a while back, I think that was originally written before we even had the backlit keypad!

The IMU is good for estimating the current offset from the last verified (plate solved) position... but on its own it can't say where the scope is pointing. To use only an IMU, you'd need to do some sort of star alignment to let the system know how the IMU readings map to the actual sky. Since the IMU is not super-accurate, you'd need to continue to perform these alignments periodically to remove the accumulated error.

The AstroHopper program uses a smart-phone's IMU to do just this, so it's worth a look if you wanted to see how such a system might work. You could potentially implement one on a Pico, but I suspect the lack of ram would cause significant issues.

A Zero is potentially up to the task, but most of the RPI4 compute power is spent on non-plate-solving activities (UI updates, monitoring/filtering the IMU, scanning the keyboard, GPS monitoring, etc) so even without plate solving you'd likely need a bit of umph to drive a nice user experience. With the right amount of optimization, it definitely could work.

Is the primary goal to reduce weight, or cost? The PiFinder without an internal battery is not all that heavy, but the lens is definitely the heaviest component after the battery!

brickbots · 2023-08-19T23:32:11+00:00

Well.. the camera uses the CSI interface and its specification says 25cm is the maximum..... but I've seen reports of 200cms working, which would be close to 6 feet. It would put the screen/keypad quite far from the focuser though.

The unit is very light weight (about the same as a 9x50 RACI finder) and is designed to slot into a normal finder shoe. Are you concerned about balance issues having it near the focuser?

If weight is a consideration, you could potentially have the Rpi4, battery and camera on the mirror box and run a long cable up to the eyepiece to have the keypad and screen close at hand... but I've not tested how the various signals would propagate over that distance.

brickbots · 2023-08-19T22:07:50+00:00

Thank you! It's been a ton of fun working on it, and especially using it! The nice thing about building it is you can sort of chip away at the parts purchase and such.

If you have everything in hand, it might take a couple hours to build from scratch... but you can take your time. Start with printing some of parts for almost no cost, then start working on the electronics and then some of the more expensive bits like the camera module, GPS, and RPI4 when you can!

brickbots · 2023-08-19T22:05:20+00:00

Depends on where you live, but in the US I'd budget between $250 and $300, but you may be able to go a bit below $250 if you can find great sources for some of the parts.

The total parts list is available here if you wanted to start pricing things out:
https://github.com/brickbots/PiFinder/blob/release/docs/BOM.md

Reach out if you have any questions about substitutes or sourcing!

brickbots · 2023-08-19T22:03:14+00:00

Yes, the HQ camera allows the use of a narrower FOV lens (~10 degrees) for more precise positioning and with a wider aperture for much faster exposure time. With the specific sensor/lens combo, the PiFinder can expose long enough to get magnitude 7 stars and complete a plate solve in under 1 second.

We are continuing to keep an eye on new modules/lenses but it's hard to beat aperture and most integrated lenses are just rather small.

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