Overwatch — a satellite control room from 100% open data

Live: https://overwatch.confinia.io · API: https://overwatch.confinia.io/api/v1 · Write-up: https://overwatch.confinia.io/article.html

A real-time control room for the ~23 cubesats currently broadcasting decodable open telemetry: their positions on a MapLibre globe, their batteries, temperatures and currents decoded locally from their actual radio frames, and the network of volunteer ground stations that heard them — self-hosted in Europe on one small server.

How it works

CelesTrak ─┐                 ┌─ MapLibre globe (web) ──── reads cache only
SatNOGS  ──┤─►  ingest  ─►  db (Postgres)                  │
           (the ONLY thing        ├─ Grafana (embedded panels)
            touching upstream)    └─ api (public /api/v1)

• One caching boundary. Exactly one service (ingest) calls the upstream APIs: CelesTrak elements every 6 h, SGP4 propagation locally every 15 s, SatNOGS telemetry every 30 min with cursor pagination. Visitor traffic never touches the upstreams.
• Local decoding. SatNOGS serves raw hex frames; the ingest decodes them with the community's 161 Kaitai Struct decoders and flattens every numeric field into Postgres — plus canonical battery_v / battery_i / battery_pct fields normalized across buses, so one dashboard works for the whole fleet.
• Who-heard-whom. Each decoded frame is linked to the receiving station (position decoded from its Maidenhead locator) and to the satellite's position at reception time — the orange lines on the globe, clickable for per-frame details.

Run it yourself

cd orbit-poc
cp .env.example .env          # optional: add a free SatNOGS token
docker compose up --build     # or podman-compose
# open http://localhost:8081  (grafana: http://localhost:3001/grafana)

Works without any token (positions + orbits); a free SatNOGS DB API key lights up the telemetry.

Public API

Free during development: GET /api/v1/satellites, /api/v1/track/{norad}, /api/v1/receptions/{norad}, /api/v1/telemetry/{norad} — docs at /api/v1/docs, self-serve keys via POST /api/v1/keys {"email"}. Rate limits apply.

Production notes

Deployed with rootless podman behind a layered caddy edge: two complete blue/green compose stacks with zero-downtime promotes and instant rollback (deploy/slots.sh), a staging slot for pre-promotion validation, and OpenTelemetry → Prometheus → Grafana observability.

Data sources & licenses

• Telemetry & receptions: © SatNOGS DB contributors, CC-BY-SA · decoders: satnogs-decoders (LGPL)
• Orbital elements: CelesTrak — respect their rate guidance
• Basemap: Sentinel-2 cloudless by EOX (Copernicus data; free for non-commercial use)
• Country lookup (API metrics): DB-IP Country Lite (CC-BY 4.0)

License

AGPL-3.0. The core is and stays open source; managed hosting, SLAs and private sovereign tenants are how the project sustains itself.

Security reports: contact@confinia.io (please report privately first).