inkystarmap

Making a map of the night sky on an Inky Impressions e-ink display

What you need

• A Raspberry Pi (tested with Zero 2WH)
• An Inky Impression e-ink display from Pimoroni.
• A micro SD card that's not too slow (I have used a SanDisk 64GB High Endurance MircoSD XC I3 V30.)
• A power cable

Hardware

Attach the Raspberry Pi to the GPIO port

Installation

Preparing for install

1. Use Raspberry Pi Imager (available from here [https://www.raspberrypi.com/software/]) to install the OS on a micro SD card. (On a Windows/MacOS/Linux system)
2. Insert the Micro SD card in your Raspberry Pi.
3. Log in on your Raspberry Pi with SSH (can be with Putty or iTerm2).

Installation, the easier way

4. Download inkystarmap_0.3.0.deb

   wget https://github.com/Marcel-Jan/inkystarmap/blob/main/inkystarmap_0.3.0.deb
   

5. Run the .deb file

    sudo dpkg -i inkystarmap_0.3.0.deb
   

6. Run inkystarmap (see Usage below)

   inkystarmap --lat 52.0141616 --lon 4.7158104 --direction 180
   

Installation, the harder way

4. Enlarge the swap space of your Raspberry Pi (these instructions worked for me: [https://pimylifeup.com/raspberry-pi-swap-file/]). (I found that installing the necessary Python packages for inkystarmap, specifically cartopy, will hang if you don't have enough swap space.)

5. In your $HOME, create a PythonProjects directory (or wherever you want to install inkystarmap).

6. Install uv (instructions here: [https://docs.astral.sh/uv/getting-started/installation/]).

7. Download this repository on your Raspberry Pi (I would do this in the PythonProjects directory).

    git clone https://github.com/Marcel-Jan/inkystarmap.git
   

8. Go in the new inkystarmap directory.

9. Run uv sync. This will create a virtual environment, install Python 3.13 there and install all necessary Python packages. (If it hangs during installation of the Python packages, check step 4.)

   uv sync
   

10. Activate the virtual environment.

    source .venv/bin/activate
    

11. Run inkystarmap (see Usage below)

    inkystarmap --lat 52.0141616 --lon 4.7158104 --direction 180

Usage

python3 inkystarmap.py --lat <your_latitude> --lon <your_longitude> --direction <direction to look at in degrees>

Example: To have a map of the southern night sky from Gouda, the Netherlands, you can run this:

python3 inkystarmap.py --lat 52.0141616 --lon 4.7158104 --direction 180