Firmware
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
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.
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
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.
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
Firmware
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
Firmware
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
Firmware
There is a particular kind of failure that haunts always-on devices, and it almost never shows up in the lab. The firmware runs perfectly for a day, a week, a month — and then, somewhere out in the field, it quietly stops. No crash log, no stack trace, just a device
Firmware
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.
Firmware
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