wtf is asiair-dashboard?

ASIAIR Dashboard is a self-hosted web page that shows you what your ZWO ASIAIR device is doing while it controls a telescope for astrophotography. It is monitoring only: it does not slew the telescope, start exposures, or guide. It simply watches the device over your home network and shows the current state in a browser. Once running, the dashboard shows a live color preview of the most recent captured frame, progress through the current imaging sequence including target name and frame count, the current exposure settings like gain and length, device health such as CPU temperature, Wi-Fi signal strength, and a running log of events. It runs alongside the official ASIAIR app rather than replacing it, connecting to the device independently. The dashboard finds the ASIAIR automatically on your network, so there is no IP address to type in by hand. For this to work, the ASIAIR has to be set to Station mode, meaning it is joined to your own Wi-Fi or wired network rather than running its own separate hotspot network, and the computer running the dashboard needs to be on that same network. The easiest way to run it is with Docker, using host networking so it can find the device on the network, for example on a NAS or an Unraid server. It can also be run directly with Node.js for development, which additionally requires the smbclient tool to be installed for reading image previews. All settings are optional and the dashboard works out of the box, though options exist to set the port, pin a specific device address, or change how often it checks for the device while offline. Under the hood, it talks to the ASIAIR over a JSON based protocol to read live status, and separately reads saved image files from the device to build previews. This protocol was worked out by the author from observing the device's own network traffic. The project is released under the MIT license.