AI
When teams build their first Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) chatbot, most of the engineering effort goes into chunking, embeddings, and vector search. That is exactly where we started at Hoomanely. But after months of iterating on a pet-health assistant grounded in veterinary books, nutrition manuals, and clinical PDFs, we hit a
Hardware
Designing hardware for a single feature turning on is relatively easy. Designing hardware for multiple subsystems waking up together without destabilising the system is where real embedded power architecture begins. Most embedded products today are no longer simple MCU boards with a few peripherals. A modern edge device may contain
Software
When users tell you "the chat feels slow," the first instinct is to blame the model. Bigger LLM, longer prompt, more retrieved context — those are the obvious suspects. But when we profiled our AI assistant's chat endpoint end-to-end, the model itself was already running about as
Firmware
A pet wearable streams six-axis motion data at 100 Hz to a home hub over Bluetooth Low Energy. The dog walks into the next room. The wall absorbs more RF than the supervision timeout can tolerate, and the link drops. Twelve seconds later the dog walks back out and the
Hardware
In embedded systems, resets are often treated as normal behaviour. A watchdog expires. A brownout occurs. A PMIC toggles reset. Firmware crashes. Power sequencing fails. A peripheral hangs the bus. A rail collapses temporarily. The system resets and comes back online. From the outside, everything appears functional again. But the
Hardware
Modern embedded systems rarely “sleep” as a single unit anymore. A connected device today is usually a collection of semi-independent subsystems working together continuously. There may be an application processor running Linux, one or more microcontrollers handling real-time control, sensors operating in low-power modes, external transceivers, PMICs, retention domains, always-on
Hardware
Cables are one of the most underestimated variables in embedded systems design. On paper, they are treated as passive conductors — short, well-terminated, and electrically invisible. Schematics assume clean transitions, stable impedance, and perfect contact. But once a product leaves the lab, cables stop behaving like ideal interconnects and start behaving
Firmware
A double-bit error in the application flash of a deployed device is not a theoretical event. It is what happens when a stray neutron — or simply an aging storage cell — flips two bits in a single sixteen-byte ECC word at the wrong instant, in the wrong region, on a customer&
Software
Hardware setup flows are deceptively hard to build well. A Wi-Fi speaker or IoT device might need Bluetooth permissions, adapter readiness, a 10-second scan, device selection, GATT connection, and a service handshake - each of which can fail independently and silently. When you are building this in Flutter, you quickly
Technology, Insights and Ideas.
Firmware
A customer's home hub stops sending data to the cloud. Logs go quiet. The Linux side looks fine — the bridge service is alive, the CAN driver is alive, but the wireless SoC it talks to over USB-CDC is silent. The chip enumerates as a serial device, so the
AI
When teams build their first Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) chatbot, most of the engineering effort goes into chunking, embeddings, and vector search. That is exactly where we started at Hoomanely. But after months of iterating on a pet-health assistant grounded in veterinary books, nutrition manuals, and clinical PDFs, we hit a
Hardware
Designing hardware for a single feature turning on is relatively easy. Designing hardware for multiple subsystems waking up together without destabilising the system is where real embedded power architecture begins. Most embedded products today are no longer simple MCU boards with a few peripherals. A modern edge device may contain
Software
When users tell you "the chat feels slow," the first instinct is to blame the model. Bigger LLM, longer prompt, more retrieved context — those are the obvious suspects. But when we profiled our AI assistant's chat endpoint end-to-end, the model itself was already running about as
Firmware
A pet wearable streams six-axis motion data at 100 Hz to a home hub over Bluetooth Low Energy. The dog walks into the next room. The wall absorbs more RF than the supervision timeout can tolerate, and the link drops. Twelve seconds later the dog walks back out and the
Hardware
In embedded systems, resets are often treated as normal behaviour. A watchdog expires. A brownout occurs. A PMIC toggles reset. Firmware crashes. Power sequencing fails. A peripheral hangs the bus. A rail collapses temporarily. The system resets and comes back online. From the outside, everything appears functional again. But the
Hardware
Modern embedded systems rarely “sleep” as a single unit anymore. A connected device today is usually a collection of semi-independent subsystems working together continuously. There may be an application processor running Linux, one or more microcontrollers handling real-time control, sensors operating in low-power modes, external transceivers, PMICs, retention domains, always-on
Hardware
Cables are one of the most underestimated variables in embedded systems design. On paper, they are treated as passive conductors — short, well-terminated, and electrically invisible. Schematics assume clean transitions, stable impedance, and perfect contact. But once a product leaves the lab, cables stop behaving like ideal interconnects and start behaving
Firmware
A double-bit error in the application flash of a deployed device is not a theoretical event. It is what happens when a stray neutron — or simply an aging storage cell — flips two bits in a single sixteen-byte ECC word at the wrong instant, in the wrong region, on a customer&
Software
Hardware setup flows are deceptively hard to build well. A Wi-Fi speaker or IoT device might need Bluetooth permissions, adapter readiness, a 10-second scan, device selection, GATT connection, and a service handshake - each of which can fail independently and silently. When you are building this in Flutter, you quickly