Hardware
Shared power makes modular hardware clean. One carrier board can feed multiple sensor boards. One backplane rail can support several modules. One main supply can branch into compute, communication, sensing, audio, illumination, and auxiliary boards. The architecture looks efficient, serviceable, and scalable. But shared power also creates shared failure paths.
AI
Everbowl logs a dog's day in numbers. Load-cell weights on every bowl visit, water refills, eye-temperature frames from the thermal camera, ambient temperature and humidity, audio classifications of chewing and licking. Across a fleet this runs into thousands of events per dog per day. Almost none of it
Software
Performance is often associated with page speed. While loading speed is an important part of the user experience, it isn't the whole story. A page may load quickly yet still feel frustrating if elements shift unexpectedly or interactions are delayed. Exploring a Next.js application that appeared fast
Firmware
When a sensor hub captures images, thermal frames, audio, and telemetry and pushes them over a 5 Mbps CAN FD bus, the software on the receiving end has exactly one job it cannot fail: don't drop frames. An image alone is thousands of CAN FD frames arriving back-to-back
AI
A dog cannot tell you it slept badly. It just does, and then it is cranky, or slow on the morning walk, or off its food, and you are left guessing why. Sleep quality turns out to be one of the earlier signals that something is wrong with a dog:
Product
How Better Design Finishes Made Everbowl More Durable Aesthetics and engineering usually get treated as separate jobs on a product team. One person worries about how something looks, another about how it holds up. Working on Everbowl blurred that line more than we expected. A handful of changes we made
Hardware
Hardware charge-current limiting, thermal cutoff paths, charger fault latching, and safe charging defaults before MCU control Battery charging should not wait for the firmware to become responsible. That is one of the most important rules in product hardware. A device may be plugged in while the MCU is still held
AI
In our previous post we described the multi-stage vision pipeline we built to identify dogs by their facial landmarks - covering preprocessing, embedding model training, gallery building, and real-time inference. This post covers what happened when we ran it on real camera footage and reviewed every result manually. Setup A
AI
When you're building a thermal-detection system to watch over a dog, the sensor you pick is only half the story. The lens sitting in front of it — and specifically how wide it sees — quietly decides how far away you can read your pup and how forgiving the aim
Technology, Insights and Ideas.
Firmware
Most engineers learn backpressure the moment a fast producer overwhelms a slow consumer: you slow the producer down. But there's a mirror-image problem that gets far less attention. When a device has been offline — a home router rebooted, the ISP hiccuped, the WiFi dropped for an hour — it
Hardware
Shared power makes modular hardware clean. One carrier board can feed multiple sensor boards. One backplane rail can support several modules. One main supply can branch into compute, communication, sensing, audio, illumination, and auxiliary boards. The architecture looks efficient, serviceable, and scalable. But shared power also creates shared failure paths.
AI
Everbowl logs a dog's day in numbers. Load-cell weights on every bowl visit, water refills, eye-temperature frames from the thermal camera, ambient temperature and humidity, audio classifications of chewing and licking. Across a fleet this runs into thousands of events per dog per day. Almost none of it
Software
Performance is often associated with page speed. While loading speed is an important part of the user experience, it isn't the whole story. A page may load quickly yet still feel frustrating if elements shift unexpectedly or interactions are delayed. Exploring a Next.js application that appeared fast
Firmware
When a sensor hub captures images, thermal frames, audio, and telemetry and pushes them over a 5 Mbps CAN FD bus, the software on the receiving end has exactly one job it cannot fail: don't drop frames. An image alone is thousands of CAN FD frames arriving back-to-back
AI
A dog cannot tell you it slept badly. It just does, and then it is cranky, or slow on the morning walk, or off its food, and you are left guessing why. Sleep quality turns out to be one of the earlier signals that something is wrong with a dog:
Product
How Better Design Finishes Made Everbowl More Durable Aesthetics and engineering usually get treated as separate jobs on a product team. One person worries about how something looks, another about how it holds up. Working on Everbowl blurred that line more than we expected. A handful of changes we made
Hardware
Hardware charge-current limiting, thermal cutoff paths, charger fault latching, and safe charging defaults before MCU control Battery charging should not wait for the firmware to become responsible. That is one of the most important rules in product hardware. A device may be plugged in while the MCU is still held
AI
In our previous post we described the multi-stage vision pipeline we built to identify dogs by their facial landmarks - covering preprocessing, embedding model training, gallery building, and real-time inference. This post covers what happened when we ran it on real camera footage and reviewed every result manually. Setup A
AI
When you're building a thermal-detection system to watch over a dog, the sensor you pick is only half the story. The lens sitting in front of it — and specifically how wide it sees — quietly decides how far away you can read your pup and how forgiving the aim