A sensor that survived −40 °C
Our first winter deployment failed in three ways we hadn't imagined. What a Saskatchewan cold snap taught us about conformal coating, brittle enclosures, and engineering humility.
// stories
Notes from the makers
The projects are tidy; the making rarely is. Here are the authors and owners telling it straight — what worked, what broke, and what they learned in the field.
Why we build simple things
The best tool is the one that actually gets used. A note on why we optimise for the field over the demo, and how "simple" is usually the hardest requirement to meet.
Debugging a tower after the fire
No vendor, no manual, one week of revenue on the line. How a burned-out telecom site came back to life over three sleepless days — and what it teaches about resilient systems.
From capstone to product
Twenty student projects, three that shipped. A look at what separated the demos that died in the lab from the ones that found their way into the world.
The mesh that healed itself
When two BreezeNet nodes dropped off during a storm, the network did something we hadn't fully designed for. A short story about emergent reliability.
Measuring water people already trust
The hardest part of WaterCheck wasn't the chemistry — it was earning the right to tell a village something it didn't want to hear. Notes on humility and data.