MCP server inside Ekos

[Thomas Nemer]

Hello,

I've been on this list quietly for several years but never posted before.

Quick intro: backyard astrophotographer in France. For a long time I 
picked targets that worked with "polar align well and track". Recently I 
tried guiding for the first time and hit a tuning wall.

The Cloudy Nights folks pointed me in the right direction, and once I 
had the basics I wanted to keep tuning, but the loop of reading logs, 
change a setting and try again was painful. I fired up an AI agent on 
the log files and it helped, but reading after-the-fact text still was a 
very long feedback loop.

So I started building an MCP server inside Ekos, first exposing the live 
state I needed for guiding diagnosis, then expanding as it became 
useful, and even some more after only because some tools looked like 
quick wins.

How it is today:

  * ~40 tools across mount / capture / guide / focus / align / scheduler
    / INDI, plus an SSE channel for typed events.
  * Streamable-HTTP MCP transport on localhost, bearer-token auth, rate
    limiting, optional read-only mode with a separate read-only token.
  * Per-tool 'readOnly' / 'destructive' / 'idempotent' annotations so
    MCP clients can show users what they're authorizing.
  * Settings UI integrated into the existing Ekos options panel.
  * 25 headless QTest cases, all green on Qt6.

To be honest my C++ experience is very old, never with Qt, and there are 
places I trusted the generative AI's proposed implementations blindly. 
Also, my rig is very modest (EQ6 Pro + 200/800 Newton + ASI 294MC Pro + 
ASI 120MM mini), so there are some tools I just can't test end to end.

Would that contribution be welcomed? I would be happy to share any more 
details


Best regards,
Thomas Nemer
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