Dispatches from the work in progress
An admin console usually starts with a straightforward setup. A page needs data, so it calls an API. Another page needs authentication, so someone adds a token. A third page needs error handling, so its developer copies a helper from somewhere else. It works, and for a while, nobody has
A bowl that never stops talking Every EverBowl in a customer's kitchen is a small sensor station: a load cell weighing food and water, a temperature probe, a microphone and a camera, all reporting to the cloud around the clock. That stream lands in two tables in Amazon
Every admin console starts with the same page: a list of all users. A table, a search box, maybe a filter for "signed up this week." In most stacks it's a one-line query and an afternoon of work. When we sat down to build that page
Packaging structure that builds first-impression trust. The first interaction of a product with a customer doesn't begin when it's switched on. It begins when the package arrives, gets opened, and shows how the product was protected and presented. That moment sets two expectations: the product should
The problem We needed two cameras on a TI AM62A7-Q1, and the SoC gives us exactly one MIPI CSI-2 receiver. It is a 4-lane port, and the cameras we picked are IMX708 modules in the Raspberry Pi Camera Module 3 class, each running 2 data lanes. The first idea everyone
Three patterns for a reliable cloud-to-device command path: derive timeouts on read, use a conditional write as your idempotency primitive, and never trust the broker to tell you which environment a message belongs to.
Inside a pet feeding station, two sensor modules share one CAN FD bus with the compute module that owns the uplink. The camera module sends images and thermal frames. The audio module records what the pet sounds like while it eats. The same event triggers both, and the bus cannot
Observation: we kept the document and deleted the code Our old admin console had grown for years. It had its own server and its own copy of every table name, and it drifted from the backend every time a field changed. The rebuild replaced it with a thin shell that
An OTA (over-the-air) firmware update replaces the software on a device remotely, without a cable or a technician. Done well, it is the mechanism that lets a product improve for years after it ships. Done badly, it is the fastest way to turn a fleet into bricks. A dependable IoT
IoT device onboarding is the sequence that takes a device from its box to a working connection with the owner’s network and your cloud: discovery, pairing, WiFi provisioning, authentication and registration. For consumer products the most dependable pattern is BLE for the first conversation and WiFi for everything after:
A time-of-flight (ToF) sensor measures distance by emitting a pulse of infrared light and timing how long it takes to return; at the speed of light, every nanosecond of round trip is about 15 centimeters of distance. Modern single-chip ToF sensors do this with an array of single-photon avalanche diodes
An edge AI camera runs its vision models on the device that holds the lens, instead of streaming video to a server. A proximity trigger decides when to capture, a quality gate rejects frames that are too dark or too blurry in under a millisecond, and only frames that pass
Pet facial recognition identifies an individual dog, not a breed, by measuring the geometry of its face and comparing that measurement against a stored profile. In our bowl-mounted camera system, a frame passes through seven preprocessing steps, a 46-point landmark model aligns the face, an embedding model turns the aligned
A Simple Request: Stop Copying Offline Logic My task looked small: when there's no internet, show a friendly "No internet connection" screen on two surfaces of our Flutter app, the Journal and the Saved posts screen. My first version worked, but it worked the hard way.
A feature only helps people if they can find it. It's easy to spend weeks building something useful, test that it works, and ship it, only to realise that new users walk straight past it. That gap between what an app can do and what users actually discover
