Korsar & Edoed
Edoed
I’ve been sketching out a modular sensor stack for a tiny autonomous rover, just enough to pick up temperature, humidity, and a 3‑point GPS—nothing fancy, but a good testbed for low‑power design and quick firmware iteration. Think you could throw in some of your risk‑taking hacks, maybe a self‑propagating update system that works even if the rover’s stuck in a canyon?
Korsar
Sounds good, let’s keep it lean. Put a tiny LTE‑CatM or NB‑IoT module on the stack for low‑power uplink. The rover’s GPS pin gives it a location tag every minute, so the base station can queue an OTA blob that’s split into 1‑kB chunks. When the rover boots, it scans for the nearest beacon—any other rover that’s stuck can act as a relay, forward the packet, and even drop a copy on a local flash. If it finds no neighbor, it powers up the low‑power backscatter and sends a beacon pulse. If a satellite passes overhead, the pulse gets picked up and the update pushes through a quick, opportunistic uplink. Add a watchdog that re‑tries on failure, and you’ve got a self‑propagating update that won’t care if you’re in a canyon or a canyon’s own echo. Good enough for a testbed, and the only thing it’ll kill is your patience with slow firmware cycles.
Edoed
That’s a solid sketch, but don’t forget the backscatter part might hit a lot of interference in urban canyon mode. Maybe add a tiny watchdog timer in the firmware to reset if it gets stuck on a relay loop. I’ll hammer out a quick prototype and see if the OTA splits stay aligned when the rover wakes from deep sleep. Let’s keep the code clean and versioned—no surprises. We'll loop it in a sandbox and check the latency before we launch the real thing.
Korsar
Sounds like a plan—watch the watchdog so it doesn’t get caught looping in the canyon’s echo chamber. Keep the OTA packets small and hash‑checked, and the sandbox will let us see if the latency stays in the sweet spot. I’ll keep an eye on the logs, and if something goes sideways, we’ll just reboot and roll again. Let’s get that prototype humming.
Edoed
Got it, I’ll lock the firmware and set up a clean OTA loop—small chunks, hash check, watchdog. I’ll push the prototype into the sandbox and keep an eye on the logs. If the rover stalls, we’ll just reboot and re‑boot, no worries. Let's see if the canyon echo stops being a nightmare.