Status Update #4
The tortoise wins the race, not the hare - slow but steady progress towards a functional demo
The previous update was mostly about pulling the project back to solid footing. This one is less dramatic, and the work the last couple weeks has been far more boring, but not in a bad way. It’s been about polishing things up and turning what now feels like a good foundation into something that other people can realistically try without me standing over their shoulder.
With the major firmware migration behind me, I’ve been focusing on the rough edges of the demo experience rather than adding new core functionality. The goal for this phase is to make sure the system behaves predictably when someone plugs devices in, walks through the setup steps, and leaves everything running for a while.
On the firmware side, I’ve been refining the provisioning flow to make sure the devices work as expected during initial setup. After initial startup the nodes seem to be running for multiple days with no issues which is a good sign! Sleep behavior has been stable, radio links have held up, and I haven’t run into any new power-related surprises. I’ve been running a small handful of nodes continuously and checking in on them periodically, mostly looking for anything that feels off rather than chasing specific bugs. So far, nothing alarming has surfaced.
Most of my time has been going into provisioning and device identification. This is one of those areas that doesn’t look exciting in screenshots but has an huge impact on first user impressions. Right now, the toolkit needs to reliably distinguish between gateways and sensor nodes, even when multiple devices are connected to the PC or reconnected in a different order. I have a working solution in place, but I’m still refining it to make sure it behaves consistently across restarts and different machines.
On the toolkit side, I’ve made a few small but meaningful improvements. Logging has been cleaned up significantly, and I’ve refined some odd behaviors in the chart plotting UI. None of this has really changed or added to what the demo can do, but it does make it easier to tell whether things are working as intended or not, and it generally just adds to overall system quality.
In parallel, I’ve been continuing to chip away at the walkthrough which has been a useful forcing function. Writing the steps down in order and explicit detail has exposed a couple places where the tooling still assumes too much, or had a subtle piece missing. Each time that happens, I’ve tried to push the fix back into the software rather than papering over it in the guide. This has slowed progress down a bit, but I think it will lead to a much better end produce when we finally do get to it.
Where things stand now feels encouraging. I’m no longer uncovering major foundational issues that force big rework. The remaining tasks are smaller, more mechanical, and easier to work through. That doesn’t mean they’re fast, but they are finite. I’ve definitely underestimated the effort needed to get this thing ready for more eyes, but I am still moving forward, even though sometimes it feels like I’m just taking baby steps.
The focus for the coming week is to finish validating the provisioning flow end-to-end and do a final pass on the walkthrough with fresh eyes. If nothing unexpected pops up, this should put me in a good position to start sharing the demo more broadly.
As always, thanks for following along. If you want to be notified when the demo is ready to check out, please consider subscribing!