Dispatches from the work in progress
A dog trots up to its bowl, takes a few bites, looks around and goes back for more. To the dog, it's just lunch. To us, it's a handful of new files. Our smart bowl, EverBowl, has two cameras, a thermal camera, a microphone and a
A dog's life stage should change as it gets older. But storing a value like "Adult" in a database does not make it change automatically. We solved this by storing the dog's date of birth and deriving its life stage whenever the profile is
To save and resume a multi-step form in a Flutter app, treat a half-finished record as its own kind of object. Keep it out of the list the rest of the app reads, and let one opt-in server parameter bring it back. In the Hoomanely app that took 1 new
Antenna placement for coexisting radios is set by an isolation budget, not by whatever board edge is left over. On Eversense, our board with LoRa, GPS and a Wi-Fi/BLE combo radio, moving the three antennas to separate edges and restoring each ground clearance raised LoRa-to-GPS isolation from 8 dB
One QR Tag, Three Lives: Designing for a Code That Never Changes Scan the disc on a dog's collar and a web page opens. Usually that page has one job: help a stranger get a lost pet home. It shows the pet, lets the owner know their tag
How we isolate tenants on DynamoDB without row-level security: tenant-leading keys, a repository floor, IAM LeadingKeys, and the GSI read that regressed isolation while getting faster.
Auto exposure and auto white balance on a microcontroller camera can run as a small firmware loop on top of the chip's hardware image signal processor (ISP), with no host and no image library. On our new camera module, a once-per-second loop meters the processed image, steers sensor
Most LLM personalisation demos look great. You pass in a profile, ask the model to "tailor this", and the first output reads as if someone who knows the user wrote it. Then you run it across a few dozen real profiles, read every result, and the picture changes.
Segment labeling means marking each stretch of a recording with its own start time, end time and sound, instead of giving the whole clip one tag. In our labeling tool, a reviewer picks from 11 labels (10 sounds plus Unknown), drags a region on the waveform, and the server saves
A hardware debounce circuit for a high-vibration environment needs a measured time window for both edges, not just a capacitor across the switch. In our reference input, a 100 kΩ pull-up and a 100 nF capacitor feeding a Schmitt-trigger input delay the release by 11.1 ms, and a 10
Great design decisions travel faster when everyone can picture them. A fastener choice, a foam type or a surface finish is second nature to engineers, but to teammates in design, operations or marketing the same choice can sound like a list of specialist terms. While taking EverBowl™ through late-stage engineering,
An audio codec on a battery wearable should be fully powered down whenever nothing is recording, and woken only when there is something worth hearing. On our dog collar, the codec, its microphone bias supply, its crystal oscillator and the MCU's audio interface are all off between recordings.
We built our content planner to extract pictures and embedded videos directly from Excel files in the browser. Google Drive links follow a different path: a background worker downloads each file and streams it into storage in 8 MiB parts, without loading the entire file into memory, even when the
Our DynamoDB scheduler writes recurring rules as rows 90 days ahead, fires them with a leased 300-second sweep, and claims each in one transaction. Plus the 6 to 24 hour gap where a row never fires.
Why an operator's already-open tab is the hardest client your platform has — and what it costs to keep it working. An operator opens a console screen, starts a support case, and types a note into a dialog. Two minutes later we deploy. Their next interaction behaves differently from
