UMBRA

Features & roadmap.

Umbra is in active private beta. Here's what's real today, what's coming, and what I'm considering — kept honest and updated as things ship.

Built — shipping today In progress — building / beta Considered — planned, not committed

Built SHIPPING

In the app today and exercised on real rigs.

Camera control

  • Native LUMIX / Panasonic control via reverse-engineered PTP.
  • Multi-camera by design — 4+ bodies, each tracked by serial number.
  • Broad-brand firing (Sony, Nikon, Canon, Fujifilm) through a gphoto2 layer.
  • Live camera detection as you plug in.
  • Expected-camera roster — a loud warning when a body your script needs isn't connected.
  • Camera library: rename and forget bodies, remembered by serial number.

Timing

  • Besselian-element contact engine: C1–C4 plus maximum.
  • Simulated, scrubbable clock and a real eclipse-day clock.
  • Saved observing sites with address geocoding and a map picker.
  • Sky view of the sun's altitude / azimuth track.

Scripting & AI

  • Contact-relative capture scripts, compatible with the established Maestro .txt format (TAKEPIC, loops, magnitude triggers).
  • AI Script Assistant — open-ended or guided interview, aware of your site and cameras.
  • Auto-validation flags shots below the horizon, exposure-cadence overlaps, and sub-floor intervals.
  • Spoken voice cues during totality.

Reliability

  • Crash-and-resume — a power loss or crash mid-run resumes and skips missed shots rather than re-firing.
  • Camera-disconnect alarm with automatic reconnect by serial.
  • Keep-awake while armed — the Mac can't sleep mid-run and lose the sequence.
  • On-disk run log — every shot (scheduled vs fired, settings, result) written to disk for auditing.
  • Thermal-aware UI throttling.
  • Simulation Analyzer reconciles the SD card's EXIF against the plan and produces an HTML report.

Distribution

  • Free for all of 2026 — donation-ware, no strings.
  • Works fully offline — no account, just a license key (critical in the field).
  • Tells you when an update is available.
  • Report a bug or send feedback from inside the app.

In progress BETA

Actively being built or hardening — usable, but not yet considered done.

Native Sony control

Via the Camera Remote SDK. Enumerates Sony bodies today; live capture is pending hardware validation. Sony testers can opt in.

Performance & thermal hardening

Continued tuning for hot eclipse-day conditions, where a throttling Mac can drop shots — the firing path is being fully decoupled from the UI so nothing can stall a shot.

Considered PLANNED

On the radar and shaping the roadmap — not committed, and listed here so you know where I'm looking.

Native Canon control

Canon EDSDK support, alongside broader per-brand validation.

High-frame-rate burst

Burst capture aimed at corona stacking.

Framing simulator

An eclipse-framing / composition tool: lens FOV plus where the eclipse sits in frame.

Step-by-step script builder

A traditional, non-AI builder for hand-crafting capture sequences.

Per-body camera profiles

Profiles learned from real hardware so each body behaves predictably.

Clock confidence

NTP-backed clock confidence and lunar-limb-corrected contact times.

Mobile controller

An iPad / iPhone secondary controller.

Raspberry Pi target

A headless Pi target — one Pi per camera — for large rigs.

Honest note: tiers move only when reality does. If something here is wrong or out of date, tell me at [email protected].