It's been great. We've been operating with it at our observatories (SPECULOOS, ESO Paranal, Chile) for the past 2 years without issues that can be attributed to Alpaca. We had to modify the Alpyca library timeout from 5 to 60s (which Astra uses) given our legacy ASCOM drivers not being as compliant as they should be, but other than that it has worked well.
Not to mention the huge issues of cosmic rays. Sure, if the lifespan of the satellite is expected to be low, then maybe tolerable. But even then, how would this be financially viable?
I'm hoping one of these efforts will lead to local translation of PDFs. Anyone aware of one? Not local, but the best I've found is using Google Translate via camera/images.
In astronomy, laser frequency combs are horribly expensive (~$0.5M), but fantastic for calibrating high precision spectrographs. It would be interesting to see if this method could be tuned for that application (namely, shifting to the visible), such to enable cheaper spectrographs.
We've colocated many SPS30s with government reference stations, and the low cost sensor have always performed relatively well. But, more importantly for my use case, they are exceptionally inter-comparable.
I used to run https://www.open-seneca.org/. But, personally, it's nice to know the PM value whilst cooking, before going on a run, etc. Permits you to take informed decisions.
I've been running multiple Sensirion SPS30 PM sensors for years, and I'm honestly amazed how well they've held up. Particularly with respect to, within their spec'd error, how new/unused SPS30s report similar values to my heavily used ones.
Curious if there are any maintenance requirements for the bosch sensor.
Yes, and it is already happening in professional astronomy. For example, the "Antarctic Tianmu Plan" [0] have shown that you can successfully capture non-trailed images without using tracking mounts by using drift-scanning CCDs—basically letting the sky move across your sensor while the detector is read out at the same rate.
I really like the VS Code extension for sqliteview.app - [0]. It also offers an edit feature for a reasonable price, in my opinion. I'm curious if there are any competing editor alternatives.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Blue_(colour)