Bootloaders, OTA updates, RTOS patterns, and the debugging techniques that keep embedded devices reliable in the field.
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
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
A pet tracker spends most of its life waiting. The dog is asleep on the sofa, the Bluetooth link to the hub is idle, and the collar's only job is to be ready the instant something happens. For a battery-powered device, "ready" and "awake"
For a camera that watches a pet, the hard question is not "can it take a picture" but "can it understand one before the picture leaves the device." Our new camera module carries a dedicated neural accelerator next to its image pipeline, and on the day
A camera module's job sounds simple: take a picture of the pet, shrink it, compress it, save it. On a microcontroller-class part, the naive version of that pipeline eats the processor. Converting a raw sensor frame into colour is millions of multiply-adds; resizing it is millions more; JPEG-compressing
A firmware build has one job that is easy to state and hard to guarantee: the image that comes out must contain every feature you believe you put in. "The build passed" feels like proof. It isn't. A build system reports on the steps it ran
Publishing an operating system to one bench device is a task. Publishing it to a fleet of devices sitting in customers' kitchens — each polling the same update feed, each capable of being permanently broken by a bad write — is a discipline. The scary part isn't the update
The hub board inside our feeding station reports air quality, light and motion to the rest of the device over a CAN bus. The firmware queued a frame. The controller accepted it. And nothing — nothing at all — appeared on the wire. There was no error code to chase, no exception,