Change log

Sky Quality Meter Workbench — Barton Lake Instruments

1.0.0 26 October 2026

The first public release.

Recording

• Reads the Unihedron SQM-LE over your network and the SQM-LU over USB, and can find an SQM-LE on your network for you.
• Records on a nightly schedule worked out from sunset and twilight at your site, so it follows the seasons by itself, or between fixed clock times.
• Can start when you sign in to Windows, so an observatory computer recovers from a restart.
• Keeps every reading on your computer, together with exactly what the meter sent back.
• Imports your existing sqm_reading_<date>.txt files, and can keep writing them for other software that reads them.

Looking at your data

• Tonight's chart on the main window, with the moon's path and the Bortle sky classes if you want them.
• SQM History: your nights as a table, a trend or a calendar, grouped by night, week, month, season or year.
• The moon's phase on every calendar date, and an option to leave out readings taken while the moon was up.
• Any night in detail, down to a single reading.
• Export to CSV, and save charts as images.

Publishing

• Keeps tonight's chart and a small reading card up to date as image files through the night.
• Uploads them to your website by FTP, FTPS, SFTP or Amazon S3. Passwords and keys are stored encrypted.
• Seven chart styles, from a high-contrast website chart to black-and-white for print.

Everything else

• Light and dark mode, and clear text at high display scaling.
• Help ▸ Check for Updates tells you when a new version is out.
• A user guide, under Help ▸ User Guide.