About the Project
Ivrea Observatory
A personal realtime observatory built to explore weather telemetry, astronomy data, sensor networks and practical system design.
Purpose
Why it exists
Ivrea Observatory started as a personal experiment to understand the sky above home through real data: light, weather, moon phases, observation windows and local environmental conditions.
Over time it evolved into a small end-to-end system: sensors collect data, devices send telemetry, a backend stores measurements and a dashboard turns everything into something readable.
Approach
Not just a dashboard
The value of the project is not the single sensor or the single page. The interesting part is the integration: hardware, firmware, APIs, database, monitoring, frontend and documentation working together.
It is a practical lab for thinking in systems: reliability, data quality, diagnostics, evolution, maintenance and continuous improvement.
Architecture
How it works
Current Scope
What is already running
Weather telemetry
Temperature, humidity, pressure and environmental data used to describe local observation conditions.
Light monitoring
Outdoor light level collected through a dedicated ESP32 node and used to understand daylight and sky conditions.
Astronomy context
Moon phase, daylight information, observation windows and sky-related indicators displayed in the live dashboard.
Lightning detection
AS3935-based lightning node with event classification, diagnostics and backend ingestion.
Camera experiments
Raspberry Pi camera integration for sky images, historical snapshots and future cloud classification.
Node health
Heartbeat, uptime, RSSI and sensor status checks to monitor reliability of the connected devices.
Technology
Stack
- → ESP32 nodes
- → Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W
- → PHP backend services
- → MySQL database
- → Local diagnostic web pages
- → Responsive dashboard and landing pages
Roadmap
What comes next
- ✓ Live weather and light telemetry
- ✓ Lightning node integration
- ↗ Camera-based sky snapshots
- ↗ Historical image archive
- ↗ Cloud and sky condition classification
- ↗ Public project journal
Professional Angle
Why this project matters
This observatory is a personal project, but it reflects a professional way of working: starting from a real need, designing a solution, integrating different components, validating data, monitoring reliability and improving the system over time.
In short: it is a small-scale example of turning an idea into a working, observable and maintainable system.