ShackClock 1.0 An All-in-One Ham Radio Shack Dashboard

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Image
  ShackClock 1.0 An All-in-One Ham Radio Shack Dashboard I've always liked the idea behind HamClock and the various commercial world-map displays aimed at ham radio operators. Put a big screen in the shack, leave it running and at a glance you can see propagation information, DX activity, satellites, weather, UTC and whatever else is useful that day. But I also wanted something I could customize. Every product I looked at had different features and displays but I wanted something that could do everything I wanted on one screen, so I wrote what I call ShackClock. ShackClock is a full screen amateur radio dashboard I built around Node-RED, Leaflet, Docker and a collection of public APIs. It will run on a Mac, Raspberry Pi or pretty much anything that can run Docker and a web browser. It is easy to setup and does not require a dedicated computer. One Screen Instead of Ten Browser Tabs At the center of ShackClock is a full-screen satellite map. The base map comes from Esri and then Sha...
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Turning Your Starlink Mini into a Real Telemetry Device - How to bridge Starlink Mini into MQTT and Node-RED for real-time monitoring and automation

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If you’re running a remote station, digital voice system or any kind of modern connected ham infrastructure, your internet link is no longer “just internet” — it’s part of your station.

Starlink Mini gives you portable, high-availability connectivity, but out of the box it’s still a black box. You can see “online/offline,” but you can’t easily observe performance, uptime, obstruction trends or state changes in a way that integrates with the rest of your telemetry systems.

That’s exactly what the starlink-mini-mqtt-node-red-1 project solves.

This project creates a bridge between Starlink Mini, MQTT and Node-RED, allowing you to treat your satellite link like any other piece of instrumented infrastructure in your shack.

What It Does

The system polls Starlink Mini status data and publishes it into MQTT topics that can be consumed by:
- Node-RED
- Home Assistant
- Grafana
- InfluxDB
- Custom automation workflows

Once it’s in MQTT, it becomes part of your normal telemetry pipeline.

Typical MQTT Topics
starlink/mini/state  
starlink/mini/uptime_s  
starlink/mini/obstruction_percent  
starlink/mini/obstructed  
starlink/mini/software_version  
starlink/mini/raw_status  

The raw_status topic provides full JSON telemetry for deeper analysis, logging,and automation.

Deployment Philosophy

This project is designed to be simple, repeatable and infrastructure-friendly.

It’s Docker-first — simplifying installation and setup.

Basic deployment:

1) Create working directories

mkdir -p starlink-mini-mqtt/data starlink-mini-mqtt/cookie_cache
cd starlink-mini-mqtt

2) Export cookies from starlink.com

Log into https://www.starlink.com

Export cookies using a browser extension that can capture them in .json format like Cookies Extractor for Chrome.

Save as data/cookies.json

Example file is provided:

cp data/cookies.json.example data/cookies.json

3) Create docker-compose.yml

This example code assumes you already have an MQTT broker:

services:
  starlink-mini-mqtt-1:
    image: ghcr.io/n3bkv/starlink-mini-mqtt-1:latest
    container_name: starlink-mini-mqtt-1
    restart: unless-stopped
    volumes:
      - ./data:/data:ro
      - ./cookie_cache:/cookie_cache
    environment:
      STARLINK_MQTT_HOST: 192.168.1.10   # your broker
      STARLINK_MQTT_PORT: "1883"

4) Start the container

docker compose up -d
docker compose logs -f starlink-mini-mqtt-1

Once running, MQTT topics begin streaming immediately.

Why This Matters in Amateur Radio

Modern ham radio depends on IP infrastructure:
- Remote-controlled stations
- AllStar / EchoLink / VoIP linking
- Digital voice and data

Your internet connection is now a mission-critical subsystem.
This project makes it observable.

Instead of guessing:
- Is my link flaky?
- Is satellite obstruction increasing over time?
- Did the dish reboot?
- How often does my connection drop?

You can measure it.

Use Cases

- Alert when Starlink drops offline
- Track obstruction percent over time
- Correlate RF outages with IP outages
- Log uptime for reliability analysis
- Integrate connectivity into station dashboards
- Drive automation based on link state

Node-RED Sample Flow

Contained in the repository, is a sample Node-RED flow that will bring all of the data available into an easy to understand dashboard as shown above.

Important Note

This project uses unofficial Starlink APIs. Backend changes may break functionality and require updates. This is normal for any cloud-scraping integration and should be treated accordingly.

Wrap-Up

starlink-mini-mqtt-node-red provides a clean, extensible way to integrate Starlink Mini telemetry into MQTT-based workflows. For hams, makers and remote-station operators, it turns a black-box internet connection into an observable and automation friendly system.

Repository:
https://github.com/n3bkv/starlink-mini-mqtt-node-red-1









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