Late at night, a smart pet bowl in a customer's kitchen quietly downloads a new operating system, installs it, reboots into it, checks that everything still works — and, finding a problem, silently reverts to the version that was working an hour ago. The owner never notices: no support
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
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
A pet tracker has to be honest about two very different things at once. Step counts come from a continuous, high-frequency motion stream that never stops, while audio arrives in big, bursty clips only when something happens. Both are health data, both must reach the cloud intact — and they have
A pet's day has a soundtrack, and most of it is health data. The rhythmic crunch of kibble, a gulp of water, a bark at the doorbell, the wet cough that wasn't there last week — each is a signal a vet would want to know about.
A thermal camera can see a fever before a dog acts sick, but only if you know which warm pixels belong to the dog. A low-resolution thermal sensor and a normal camera look at the same scene from slightly different places, through different lenses, at different resolutions. Point them at
A barking dog tells you something. A lunging, barking dog tells you a lot more. On a battery-powered pet collar, the two most informative senses are motion and sound, but you can't run a microphone flat-out all day, and a motion sensor alone can't tell a
A pet-health monitor doesn't get to reboot when it feels like it. It sits on a kitchen floor, watches a bowl, weighs every meal, listens for chewing, runs computer-vision models on-device, and uploads insights, continuously, for months, unattended. The Linux underneath all of that is not a detail.
A dog's weight is arguably the single most predictive number in preventive care. A slow upward creep is the earliest signal of obesity; a slow decline can be the first whisper of kidney disease, dental pain, or a dozen other conditions a vet would love to catch months
How do you count a dog's steps when the dog might be a four-kilogram terrier or a sixty-kilogram mastiff, walking, trotting, or flat-out galloping? You can't hard-code a step frequency, because there isn't one, a small dog's legs cycle nearly twice as