I hate to ask this, but I must. There have been no updates on the Astroarch front for over a month. I am very much reminded of Astroberry, which also seemed to die as a platform as its developers, understandably, found the effort more demanding than they hoped and disappeared. I bear them no ill will and understand the problems they must have faced. And I'm grateful for their contributions.

Will there be new Astroarch releases anytime soon?

As I have had nothing but frustration due to a combination of noob ignorance, steep learning curves, possible hardware problems:
- Is my Raspberry Pi really solid electronically?
- Has it deteriorated in the elements?
- Or are my problems the result of some obscure setting?

My latest misadventure may be found here .

I am forced to consider whether I should look into something like Stellarmate, which, as a commercial venture may be a more reliable platform, still in the open source world which I love, but not as subject, I hope, to developer abandonment.

The base structure to all these is the same and you can always setup everything at your own, but with Stellarmate you get the "product" with no installations hustles, the mobile application access & of course the support that you probably need more.

www.stellarmate.com/support.html

Hi Steve, straight to your point:

it is alive, yes, indi has been released 3 days ago and it's not there yet, forgive me. I am close to a new release that should close a couple of buggers that have been around since a while, but I will look for beta testers before releasing it.

reality it's what it is and family and work must take priority over the project, especially when negative things impact one's ability to focus on other things like this project.

saying that, it seems I am 95% done with the next release and only 2 blockers remain, I have reached out to Stephane to ask for some ideas)

I don't have anything to say towards your point about a commercial solution, I really think everybody should pick what suits best their own need!

also, not to discharge things, but I am still a single mantainer and even if I am an old Linux user, I may not feel comfortable with specific issues (also related to hardware), I prefer to shut up when I don't know a thing instead of guessing and talking

Support is probably not my top concern. Concern for the greater solidity of the Stellarmate vs RPi is probably more important in my mind.

Thanks for all you have done and are doing, I hear ya and get what you're saying.

And it appears that cabling, of all things, may possibly be a source of my latest SNAFU.

I think occasional updates from the developers if difficulties delay things may inspire confidence in the users.

AstroArch is alive!

Mattia works hard, and the OS management is going well.

A little patience because this is a major version for greater stability and occasional corrections

I did not mean to be a nag, but I was in a crabby state when I wrote this and had bad memories of Astroberry. I am very optimistic that Mattia, you Stephane, and the rest of this team will get things going soon.

However, the last few months have been very disappointing for me as one thing after another happened to poor old Calamity Steve. Things that worked okay stopped working.

I came to realize that my problems probably had more to do with hardware than with software. Get one thing solved, only to find another one waiting behind it My laser-like gaze of suspicion has fallen on that little plastic brick called the Raspberry Pi. How durable was it really?

I decided to buy a more robust package called the StellarMate. At least that will allow me to finally exonerate my camera. Of course this means I will no longer be using AstroArch. I will miss you guys and all that you do, but my reasons for doing so are hardware rather than software-related and I wish you the best of luck. I suppose you might say I am too old to live on the bleeding edge.

The StellarMate will not ship for another month at least, so if the weather improves, I may give the old gear another try, and you may hear from me again. If not, I wish you the best of luck and thank you for all you’ve done to help me.

— Calamity Steve