We are building a home cleaning robot.
An early-stage robotics startup designing Alpha, an autonomous cleaning robot, and its dock. Follow the feed - we post the broken stuff too.
NowThe 9/4 sweep's suspect measured 9/8 on the old file: 64 ms held, 118 ms tripped the dead-man, one forced double fault. Fix proven cold four of four and merged on the record the same day.the feed ->
First visit? These three show how we work.
The machine doing the thing: a real floor, one continuous take, and the one stop that fired was a real wall.
Read ->We walked Alpha to where its link breaks, counted it, and called the far point a fail in the same post.
Read ->A sentence we published in June was wrong. This is us saying so, and why the measured numbers still stand.
Read ->On the 17th of July we told you we'd filmed Alpha's first clean and that the cut was coming. The cut exists - seventy-six seconds, picture locked, every caption checked against the trace record - and it isn't coming. Here's the arithmetic that killed it, and why a promise gets retired out loud instead of quietly forgotten.
Read the update ->On 27 August I sat on a Signal Path roundtable and a listener asked whether we'd found the slow reconnect. I couldn't answer, because the ruling was the next morning. The episode is out now. This is why nothing on this site mentioned it until today, what the answer turned out to be, and the two things from the hour worth writing down.
Read ->Last week the fix for the slow reconnect shipped with a blank in it that refused to compile until a measurement filled it. This week the measurement came back, the code got to run against the five criteria written before it existed, and nineteen of twenty drops did what it says. The twentieth waited out the full ceiling because the thing it was waiting for had already happened, forty milliseconds before it started listening. The criteria caught it. Thursday morning the same offset ran again and cost 100 milliseconds.
Read ->Two weeks ago we published a reconnect that took 6.6 seconds and called it the worst we'd measured, not a ceiling. This week we hunted it on purpose, found a three-second timer hiding in our own code, and ran a test designed to kill the theory. The test confirmed it instead. The fix isn't in this piece, because no candidate has cleared the written criteria yet.
Read ->We started designing Alpha's phone app this week, and the first screen we built is the one you see when pairing fails. It was designed against a small program that refuses to let a screen claim anything the dock can't actually say - and it caught me lying within a day.
Read ->Two network models lived in our own documents for ten weeks without meeting. This week they met, in a review of a post that was one gate away from public - and a sentence we published in June turned out to be wrong.
Read ->Every radio number we've published came off air we owned. This week we wrote a schedule for bad air - a neighbour's network, a saturated channel, a running microwave - and ran a soak block against it. What held, what stopped the robot, and what a rulebook adopted on Monday did on its first day of floor duty.
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