Ooh great timing! I've been working on a custom firmware replacement (Yocto base) + FOSS control app for existing smart telescopes with plans to release a beta in the next month or so. Currently I'm building out Support for the ZWO Seestars, Dwarf Mini/II/III, Vaonis Vespera, and Unistellar Odyssey (this one's very WIP though). Also working on a nice HAL and plugin system to make porting the CFW to new devices as simple as possible. To tie it all together the firmware also has an Alpaca server running on it.

Currently the state of software development for these smart scopes are...not good. I even wrote about the issues years ago when I "jailbroke" my Seestar S50[1]. With a proper open source solution + better quality gates, it's finally turning into something usable for us power users. I'll give ZWO credit for one thing though, at least they themselves finally admitted defeat and added native Alpaca support in the end.

If you do release your open source Seestar alternative, let me know and I'll write a HAL driver for it.

1: https://www.cloudynights.com/forums/topic/900861-seestar-s50...