There is a design and instructions on github for an RGB monitor showing real-time LSST alerts as they arrive. Tiny lightweight alerts are pulled from Lasair to a Raspberry Pi – alerts with just ra and decl attributes. The RPi is in a display picture frame and is running Confluent Kafka. Once onboard, the positions of the alerts are binned in RA,Dec in a 32x32 RGB matrix and shown as “on” pixels. Just for visual interest Conway’s Game of Life is spawned on all the non-zero bins. Blue fades fastest and Red fades slowest.
I changed it today to read LSST alerts instead of ZTF alerts (see attached movie). The settings.py changes the Kafka settings become: kafka_server = 'lasair-lsst-kafka_pub.lsst.ac.uk:9092' and topics = ['lasair_1Lightweight_copy']. Also Decl range changes from from (-25, 75) to (-70,+30),
The alerts seem to arrive from Chile from early to late morning in Scotland, just as they did with ZTF on Pacific Time. I like to wake up, and give it a glance just to see if anything is flowing.