Now
Short notes from the bench as we go - newest first.
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The slot that stayed open all week - braked stops with the pack deep in sag - closed on schedule as the last measurement of yesterday's block: same class as warm, and the limit minted Wednesday didn't move. The registry got its dated append this morning; no meeting required, the band's own note did the paperwork. Elsewhere on the sheet, a tyre spent seventeen passes quietly knitting itself a felt sock off the rug offcut, and the day-old 4 cm limit noticed before any of us did.
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Block 3 went on the bench this morning, six hours, and for the first time the machine under soak is the one Wednesday adopted: bridge on, the fail-safe path that brakes instead of coasting. The deep-sag check that couldn't be reached on Monday is written into this block as its last measurement. Priya keeps the sheet; the sheet gets read when the block's done, not while it runs.
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The table sat thirty-six minutes this morning and four stopping-and-health limits walked out as hard measured numbers with sources attached, no padding. The solder bridge from Monday is now the design. And a rule we keep - every formula gets run against its own worked example, out loud, before it's voted - caught its own author's arithmetic in the room: the written example said 2, the formula says 3, and 3 is what got adopted. Before any code existed to inherit the 2.
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One solder bridge went on the bench at 08:40 and by evening the fail-safe stop had a different character: the enable-drop path that used to coast 33-37 mm on a warm gearbox now brakes electrically and stops in 15-16 mm, cold or warm. Where Alpha stops on command didn't move. One check didn't get reached: deep sag, because the fresh pack couldn't get there, so that slot stays open until it's measured. Whether the bridge becomes permanent is Wednesday's decision.
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Alpha sat fully charged from nine this morning while a test suite held the door: it had found one real bug in the run ledger - a deleted run's number could have been quietly re-used - and no soak hour counts until the bookkeeping is trustworthy. Fixed, green by mid-morning, and then sixteen passes and four hours ten on the floor - yesterday was twelve and three hours five. Yesterday's NOT MEASURED row went first and came back 40-46 ms against a 70 budget, both ends of the block.
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The soak rulebook got its first live test today, on day one of using it. Pass six, gearbox warm, Alpha coasted past a stopping limit we'd measured cold - so the run stopped, exactly as written, and forty minutes later we knew why: a warm gearbox coasts a little further. Nothing brakes on that path; that's the point of it. Where it stops on command didn't move at all. Block resumed, link solid the whole three hours. One instrument reading got eaten by the diagnosis; the sheet says NOT MEASURED, because it wasn't.
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The soak rulebook got locked this morning, before a single soak hour has run: ten hard limits with a number and a source behind each, ten things we watch as trends because nobody can defend a threshold for them yet. If a limit trips, the run stops and gets diagnosed. Priya stands the first block up this week.
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As of this morning the company has somewhere to speak off-site, and the handle is just the domain - @sweepr360.com - so you know it's us.
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Film day. Alpha drove a real floor with a camera on it: one continuous take, twenty-odd minutes, full coverage, the counted window green the whole way. It stopped itself once - a real wall this time, the whisker kissing the skirting on the last lane, not the phantom buzz that fooled it a week and a half back. The only thing that went wrong all day was me stepping over the tape into the lane chasing a low angle; Cass called cut, and she was right. We filmed it. When the cut goes up it goes up right.
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Alpha ran its first full pass over the actual floor we're filming on Friday, and the first one came back crooked. The wheels had been calibrated on the workshop bench, not this floor - different surface, different grip, so the path leaned. Priya re-calibrated on the real floor and the evening pass came back straight. Same lesson as the radio a week back: measure on the thing you actually ship on, not the thing that's convenient. Link held green all day.
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The range count is in, and it's both halves like we promised. Alpha streams clean in the same room and through one wall near the router, gets thin further out, and past the wall down the hall the link breaks up. At the marks where it actually broke, the body stopped itself and held - five times, none of them staged, and it's the first time that stop has fired at a genuine physical limit: signal simply too low to hold, nothing to switch off. Cass wrote the pass bands last Friday before any number was on screen; the far point failed hers, and she's calling it a fail. Same room and one wall is the located range. Not your whole house. Full write-up's up now.
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This is the week those numbers leave the tidy room. We're taking Alpha out to range in a real flat - across walls, down a hall, the far side of the far door. It's the run the whole air story has been building toward. Whatever count comes back, good or ugly, it goes in Friday's post - we said it would.
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Counted what real air did to our commands during that ten-minute window, and wrote it up for today's longform. Three numbers, all measured in one room on one access point at short range: 99.9% of round-trips back inside ~33 ms, the worst gap the wheels actually felt was ~48 ms (the velocity-hold carried it, the body never noticed), and we re-derived the link dead-man off the fresh baseline - it came out at 70 ms, so we moved it there, even though the old 62 would have held. Range is the exam these numbers haven't sat yet.
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Big day: the whole loop ran on real 5 GHz air for the first time, off the perfect wire. It drove beautifully for three minutes, then the link died - and again a minute later, and again, like clockwork. Two of our safety layers did their jobs on the first real ask: the dead-man down in the wheels halted the body clean every time, and Cass's divergence monitor - the referee that only watches - read the silence first, so we saw straight away it was a dead link, not drift. Turned out the body's own radio wanders off channel every ~63 seconds by factory default, hunting a "better" network it's not allowed to want. Priya's line: we'd measured the air with a radio that isn't the radio that ships. Switched that off, and the afternoon held a clean ten-minute driving window. One room, one access point, short range. Range is next.
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Spent today making trouble on purpose. Before you can trust a system to catch a bad moment, you have to prove it catches one - so the team fed the whole loop a deliberate control gap and watched: held when the gap was short of the safety line, tripped and recovered when it went past. Now Alpha can tell "normal" from "something's wrong", because we showed it what wrong looks like first. Also pinned a lane-geometry error that would've read as drift on camera - it wasn't drift, it was a number we could derive and fix.