Every so often, a constraint on a board is so tight it stops being a nuisance and becomes the whole design. This was one of those. We had a carrier board that needed to control the power state of several system-on-modules — up to six of them from one carrier — and
The first minute a customer spends with a connected device decides how they feel about it forever. Unbox a smart pet bowl, open the app, and within about a minute it should just be online — quietly uploading, ready to watch over their pet. But that minute hides a genuine chicken-and-egg
Our IMU-based activity tracker clips to a dog's collar and, in principle, can tell you how far your dog walked today. In practice it needs a teacher. An accelerometer strapped to a moving neck produces a beautiful, noisy waltz of a signal, and turning that waltz into a
Why a part that survives a load test can still fail in the field, and how designing for wear, not just strength, improved the long-term reliability of Everbowl. One of the first questions a mechanical engineer asks about a part is "will it break?" FEA, hand calculations, and
When most people think about the engineering behind a pet wearable, they imagine motion sensors, batteries, AI models, or health analytics. Those are the visible innovations. What they rarely think about is the invisible layer that determines whether any of those innovations reach the user at all: Bluetooth connectivity. A
Before a page shows up in search results, a search engine has to know it exists. That's indexing, and it normally happens through crawling: a bot follows links from pages it already knows about, reads your sitemap, and revisits your site on some schedule it decides for itself
How real-world fabrication variability shaped the design of Everbowl, and why engineering for consistency matters more than designing for perfection. Introduction Every CAD model starts out in a world of perfect geometry. Holes sit exactly where they're supposed to, surfaces are flat, and every dimension matches the drawing
Mobile testing is often seen as verifying layouts across different devices, but this task turned out to involve much more than UI validation. While testing the application, I also worked on implementing UXCam analytics events, which highlighted how closely testing and user behavior tracking are connected. One focused on making
Replacing the operating system on a computer usually means having your hands on it: a cable, a USB stick, a recovery button, someone in the room. Now imagine that computer is inside a pet's feeding bowl, in a stranger's kitchen, behind their home router, three time
The last post ended on an open problem: we could not make phone-photo galleries work well enough to matter. Adding more enrollment images made things worse, not better. This post is about what we changed and what finally moved the numbers. The setup Before getting into results, it helps to