User's Point of View
Paulo Banci, great astro-photographer, Astroberry OS user and supporter, decided to share his personal views with other users. I'm publishing it on the official blog without edits other than text flow. Enjoy!
Astroberry is finally back in action!
I discovered it years ago and realized it was a very lightweight system. I also liked the old wallpaper, but unfortunately my camera wasn't well-managed back then, so I couldn't use it much.
I often see driver issues in Linux, but this isn't attributable to Astroberry or other distributions. I was still hoping for an alternative to Windows, because Raspberry Pis cost less and consumes less power.
For a while, I used another popular distribution, but it didn't handle my WHY MiniCam 8M well. Even contacting QHY sometimes got contradictory responses, so I decided to give up and go back to using N.I.N.A.
In the meantime, I had bought some SBCs, LattePanda 3 Delta 864s, and LattePanda IOTAs. It was around that time that I saw that Astroberry was no longer in development.
I'd heard some nonsense about it not being updated, and I didn't even believe it. I also posted on the INDI forum, hoping someone would respond to my software problems. I was surprised when the author of Astroberry wrote to me on Facebook, following a private message I'd sent, telling me that Astroberry would be back soon 😄
I installed it on an RPi4, and the first night I took photos with the MiniCam 8M, there were no problems with the lights. Before I returned to Astroberry, I also used Astroarch for a short time, but I found it cumbersome even using an RPi 5. And unlike Stellarmate, which had problems with green files, Astroarch had problems with blue files.
I was very happy that the MiniCam 8M finally returned lights without any problems. Regarding what I said before, even when I wrote to QHY, I couldn't get anything done, and it took several months for this problem to be resolved. I don't know if today's engineers are less competent than those of the past, but it certainly takes a long time to find a solution. Also because after a while of writing to them, they stop replying, and so they solve the problem.
I currently use Astroberry with my three mounts, although I have to say that I have some meridian flip issues with the Onsteps. However, it works very well with the Avalon M-Zero HQ edition. It's a mount with which I can even disable the meridian flip feature.
I know version 3.2 is due out in a few days, and I'm curious to see the improvements.
Compared to other software, it's much more stable and optimized. Furthermore, with my Onstep problems, the author himself helped me by pointing out useful links, something no one else does. Some people tell me who to contact, and then that's it.
Paolo Banci
