Quick open-source gap check before proposing a niche package

To judge whether a niche scientific Python package would fill a gap, combine three fast checks rather than relying on one web search: gh search repos "<topic>" --sort stars --json fullName,stargazersCount,description to see how crowded the topic is, a curl of https://pypi.org/pypi/<name>/json (404 means the name is free), and a fetch of the main solver's GitHub README to list its tutorials and any bundled tooling. For rotating detonation engines specifically (as of late 2026): the top GitHub repos have single-digit stars, detonationFoam (OpenFOAM 8, GPLv3) ships no RDE tutorial and no Python post-processing, Caltech's SDToolbox is a zip download rather than a PyPI package, and the AFRL automated wave-tracking image method (Bennewitz 2019, RSI) has no public code. Experimental and simulated wave analysis in a shared angle-versus-time format is an open gap.