Feature request: manual IP entry in the Seestar app
Writing as a professional astronomer I'd like to make the case for adding a simple option to the Seestar app: alongside the auto-discovered telescope list, a field where you can type in an IP address and port to connect directly.
The app currently finds the telescope via mDNS broadcast on the local network. This works fine when the controlling device and the telescope are on the same Wi-Fi, but it falls over the moment you try anything else — because mDNS doesn't cross network boundaries.
This matters because Telescope Network, while a nice idea, is unreliable in practice. Frequent dropouts, second-plus latency on commands, and a hard dependency on ZWO's cloud relay being healthy. For anyone trying to do sustained remote sessions, it's frustrating.
Meanwhile, every other remote-control architecture you might want to build is blocked by the discovery problem:
- Tailscale or WireGuard tunnels deliver perfectly good IP-level reachability to the Seestar, but the app can't see the telescope across them because no mDNS.
- Travel routers bridging the Seestar's Wi-Fi to a wired LAN have the same issue.
- Institutional VPNs, SSH tunnels, anything else — same problem.
The fix is trivial: a text field and a Connect button. Type "192.168.1.50:4400" (or whatever the Seestar uses), the app connects directly, discovery is bypassed. No change for anyone who prefers the current auto-discovery flow. It just unlocks a long list of deployment patterns that are currently impossible.
Specific cases this would enable:
- Seestar at a remote dark site, accessed from home via Tailscale.
- Seestar at an observatory where the control room and the telescope are on different network segments.
- Seestar on a permanent pier with a Pi or mini-PC handling networking, reached over a VPN.
- University teaching setups where the Seestar lives in an instrumentation lab and students drive it from classrooms.
- Outreach events where the telescope is outside and the demonstrator wants to control it from indoors over a longer link than Wi-Fi can manage.
I know the community has built seestar_alp to work around this, and it's excellent. But that's a workaround — it requires users to abandon the official app entirely just to do something the app is one text field away from supporting natively.
The Seestar hardware is genuinely good, and the S30 Pro especially is being marketed as a serious tool with ASCOM Alpaca support, mosaics, equatorial mode, and so on. Manual IP entry is one of the smallest possible changes that would let the app match that ambition. It would also reduce load on the Telescope Network cloud relay, which presumably ZWO would welcome.
Is there a reason this hasn't been added? Genuinely curious whether it's a deliberate product decision or just something that hasn't come up the priority list. If it's the latter, consider this a vote.
