Three modules made significant jumps this week. Plateau figured out how to measure level, Peregrine got meaningfully smarter, and Borealis moved from milled prototype to ready-for-DIY-manufacturing.
Plateau and the BNO055
Plateau is the campsite leveling module. This week it moved to an Adafruit BNO055 IMU on an ESP32-S3 Zero and picked up the standard CAN and OTA plumbing that the rest of the platform shares. The DIY EDA is ready, the milling toolpaths are generated, and the calibration data pipeline now flows through Headwaters and syncs to the cloud. Next step is field testing, which means actually parking a rig on an uneven site and seeing what the numbers do.
Peregrine gets a brain upgrade
Peregrine switched to Radxa OS to take advantage of the NPU on our target board. Ollama was swapped out for genie, and the model dropped to a 1B-parameter Llama variant. The tradeoff paid off: responses are faster, and the quality is better than what the larger model was producing on this hardware. False wake-word triggers got tuned down. JSON responses no longer get read aloud by the TTS (that bug was exactly as funny as it sounds). We added intents for GNSS coordinates and leveling commands, so you can ask Peregrine where you are and whether you're level.
Borealis meets the mill, then the fab
Borealis had a productive week. The DIY board went through two revisions on the mill. We switched to a better temperature and humidity sensor mid-week. Reverse polarity protection and a better buck converter went in. By Sunday the board was in a working state with the DIY version, and a revised manufacturing-grade board was being prepped for a real fab run.
KiCAD library growth
The shared library picked up Molex connectors with distributor part numbers, the BNO055, the SGP30 air quality sensor, and a cleaner IMU and buck converter family. This is the part of the platform that rarely shows up in headlines but makes every new module faster to design.