Firmware
Two sensors share one I²C bus on our hub. One is an MLX90640 thermal imager sampling an 8×8 temperature grid twice a second. The other is a combination proximity-and-barometer that checks the room distance and ambient pressure at roughly the same cadence. Each sensor looks harmless in isolation.
Every software product begins with a simple vision. The first few features are straightforward, the codebase is easy to understand, and engineering decisions are made with confidence because the system is still small. As products mature, however, the landscape changes. New capabilities are added, teams expand, delivery timelines become tighter,
Firmware
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
Product
How Real-World Use Drove Mechanical Design Decisions No matter how carefully a product is engineered, its first encounter with real users almost always reveals something the design team did not anticipate. Engineers interact with products differently than users. During development, devices are handled deliberately, assembled with care, and operated according
AI
In our first post on the bark detection pipeline, we showed how a single threshold on jerk_3d_max gives a useful signal for detecting barks from a dog collar IMU. For any capture window where jerk_3d_max crosses 6.5 g/s, the rule calls it a bark.
Hardware
Why pin assignment is not just routing convenience Dense connectors look harmless on a schematic. A row of pins. A few high-speed lanes. Some power. Some ground. A few control signals. Maybe an I2C bus, reset, interrupt, enable lines, and one or two spare pins. Everything fits. Then the board
Firmware
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.
AI
Not every safety check belongs in the same place. Some only make sense on the user’s question, some only on the model’s answer, and some on both. Here is how we structure the guardrails on our veterinary chatbot — and why the input/output split matters. A guardrail isn’
Firmware
A fleet of connected devices is a relentless text generator. Every device runs a dozen cooperating services, and each one narrates its life in log lines: startup banners, retries, sensor readings, stack traces. Across a hundred-plus devices that adds up to hundreds of thousands of lines a day, spiking into
Hardware
Timing discipline during voltage transitions Power does not become stable in one instant. A board may receive input power, but the internal rails are still ramping. A regulator may be enabled, but its output has not yet reached tolerance. A level shifter may see one side alive before the other.