Under active development. Breaking changes expected. APIs, installers, and UI may shift between releases.
One command. Paired ground station.
Usable today. Early access — some pieces run behind a feature flag and APIs may shift between releases.
INSTALL
One line. Five minutes.
Open a terminal on the board or SSH in. The installer auto-detects the board, installs dependencies, writes systemd units, and picks the right profile.
$curl -fsSL https://install.altnautica.com | sudo bash -s -- --pair YOUR_PAIR_KEYSupports Raspberry Pi OS, Ubuntu 22.04 and 24.04, Armbian, and Debian 12 on ARM64. A hardware fingerprint picks the ground-station profile on boards without a flight controller.
FIRST BOOT
Power on to paired, no laptop required.
The captive portal runs on the ground node itself. You need a phone, the case passphrase, and about two minutes.
1
Power on
A fresh board with the image flashed. First boot takes under 60 seconds.
2
Access point comes up
The node broadcasts its own access point with a passphrase printed on the case.
3
A phone joins
The captive portal opens automatically on Android, iOS, macOS, and Windows.
4
Pair and configure
Enter the pair key, set the network, and the node writes its config. Skip what you do not need.
5
Handoff
The last screen links to the local Mission Control build or the hosted GCS. You are flying.
PAIRING
One key on both sides.
The air unit and the ground node share a pair key. Once paired, they share a WFB-ng channel, a session key, and a link.
If you ran the installer with a pair key, the ground node is already paired. If not, enter the key on the captive portal pair page, which also accepts a QR scan. After pairing, the node writes the WFB-ng session key, sets the channel on both sides, and brings up receive. The first frame arrives in under ten seconds.
Key rotation is a two-minute task. Long-press the select button on the OLED menu to trigger rotation. The air unit receives the new key over the same WFB-ng channel. No cable swap, no re-pair.
DAY TWO
The Hardware tab in Mission Control.
Eight sub-views, one per topic, with live updates over WebSocket. Every config in the setup webapp is here too, plus more.
Overview
Agent version, profile, uptime, CPU, RAM, temperature, storage.
Network
Access point controls, WiFi client scan, Ethernet, cellular, uplink priority, failover events.
WFB-ng Radio
Channel, bitrate, FEC profile, live RSSI, session key rotation.
Physical UI
OLED status mirror, button remap, brightness, screensaver timing.
Storage
Recording files, log archive, free space, retention policy.
Distributed RX
Role selector, relay list, FEC-repair counts, one-click receiver promotion.
Mesh
Neighbors, link quality, gateway election status, mesh id, leave mesh.
Peripherals
USB devices, Bluetooth gamepads, HDMI kiosk status, cellular modem.
The Hardware tab lives in the open-source Mission Control at github.com/altnautica/ADOSMissionControl. Same code, same license.
FACTORY RESET
Two ways to start fresh.
Both paths clear the pair key, WiFi client profiles, mesh state, and recorded files. The agent binary itself stays installed.
Physical
OLED and the back button
Hold the back button for ten seconds. The OLED shows a confirm screen. Tap to confirm or cancel. About 20 seconds total.
Remote
Mission Control Hardware tab
The Advanced section carries a Factory reset action. A typed-phrase confirm prevents accidents. Same effect as the OLED path.
Install. Pair. Fly.
The installation walkthrough, troubleshooting, and factory-reset procedures all live in the public docs.
Installation docs