Wireless Bobulator

Riverside Athletic Center

Thu, 02 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Riverside runs leagues, school tournaments, and weekend events across fourteen courts built in three construction phases. Score controllers spoke two BLE profiles, legacy horns used dry contacts, and the newest light bars expected Wi-Fi multicast. The old integration treated each protocol as a separate project.

“Before the Bobulator, every tournament started with someone walking the courts and chasing clocks. Now one reviewed rule leaves every court together.”

— Maya Chen, Director of Operations, Riverside Athletic Center

15-minute quickstart

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

This path starts with a factory-reset WB-1 and ends with a reviewed rule firing across two zones. It does not require the cloud, an app store, or an account on our infrastructure.

0. What you need

one WB-1, its USB-C supply, and a laptop on the same network;
curl, jq, and websocat;
15 minutes and one input you can change safely.

Use the fictional host below exactly until your unit announces a different .local name.

Sports Facilities

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

A competitive court is a real-time system that happens to have people in it. The buzzer, the shot clock, the scoreboard, the floodlights, and the PA all have to agree on the same instant — and right now they’re five separate boxes from five vendors, wired by whoever had the ladder that week. The Wireless Bobulator collapses them into one orchestration layer.

FIG. U4 · game night: court 3 ends its period; seven courts never notice

Eight basketball courts under one WB-1: when court three's shot clock hits zero the horn, scoreboard and zoned LED lighting fire as one chain in under 8 milliseconds, while the four live games on neighbouring courts are untouched.

The scenario: a multi-court complex on game night

Eight basketball courts, each with its own shot clock, scoreboard, and zoned LED lighting, plus a shared PA. A game ends on Court 3 while four other games are live. Here’s the chain the Bobulator runs in under 8 ms from buzzer to lights:

How we build

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This is not a values mural. These are choices that cost schedule, board area, or convenience and survived anyway. Each principle points to the surface where a visitor can check it.

Principle 1 — Decisions happen at the edge

A building should not lose its reflexes because an uplink is slow or a vendor’s status page is red. The Cortex-M7 owns the deterministic path; cloud services may analyze history, never hold the critical loop. The split is visible in the architecture.

Hartwell Controls — Cell 4

Wed, 08 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Hartwell’s six-cell assembly line is a hostile place for radios and a worse place for ambiguous faults. Four variable-frequency drives sit within twenty metres of Cell 4. The previous gateway forwarded edge transitions to the cloud, where retries and VFD noise produced an average of seventeen false stops a week.

“The useful change was not another dashboard. It was proving why the line stopped, in order, while the evidence was still warm.”

Rule DSL reference

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Rules are versioned data evaluated once per 1 kHz engine cycle. A candidate revision is parsed and validated before activation; an unknown key fails the revision and leaves the active set untouched.

Grammar

rule := "rule:" id newline priority when then
priority := "priority:" integer[1..100]
when := "when:" ("all:" condition+ | "any:" condition+)
condition := input comparator value | builtin comparator value
then := "then:" action+
action := output set value | emit event | hold_until condition

Canonical YAML shape:

Smart Buildings

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The average commercial floor runs lighting, HVAC, access control, and occupancy sensing as four independent systems that barely speak. Each has its own gateway, its own app, its own idea of what “the third floor” means. The Bobulator makes them one system with one rule set — and replaces a closet full of single-protocol gateways with a single device per floor.

FIG. U3 · a floor waking zone by zone — never all at once, never an empty corner

An office floor split into four zones around one WB-1: the lobby is lit and pre-cooled ahead of the first badge-ins, open desks wake with the occupancy trend, meeting rooms stay dark until booked, and the empty corner burns nothing — lighting, HVAC, access and occupancy coordinated by a single device per floor instead of four separate gateways.

The scenario: an office floor waking up

It’s 06:40. The first badge taps the lobby reader. Across the next twenty minutes the floor comes to life, zone by zone, ahead of the people — never the whole floor at once, never an empty corner burning power:

Meridian Event Hall

Wed, 15 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Meridian’s movable walls create three halls, one ballroom, or seven breakout rooms. That flexibility used to produce brittle automation: the lighting scene knew yesterday’s wall plan, the room scheduler knew today’s, and accessibility strobes lived on a third controller.

“We stopped treating every room flip like a new integration. The state follows the wall plan, and the show keeps its cues when the uplink does not.”

— Nia Brooks, Technical Operations Manager, Meridian Event Hall

Industrial Automation

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

On a factory floor, “latency” stops being a UX metric and becomes a safety property. A light curtain that halts a conveyor in 8 ms protects a hand; one that takes 80 ms doesn’t. The Wireless Bobulator was built for exactly this seam — fusing dozens of sensors, making the call deterministically, and proving in the audit log that it made the right one.

FIG. U2 · the cell that protects itself: curtain breach → conveyor halt, 8 ms

A packaging cell: conveyor, robot arm, two vibration sensors, and a light curtain at the load point all report to one WB-1 running a priority-100 interlock rule. A curtain breach halts the conveyor in 8 milliseconds — at 80 milliseconds the belt would travel ten times farther before stopping.

The scenario: a packaging cell that protects itself

A single cell has a conveyor, a robotic arm, vibration sensors on two motor bearings, a light curtain at the load point, and an operator HMI. Three jobs run at once — predictive maintenance, a safety interlock, and the live operator view — all from one Bobulator:

Events & Venues

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

A festival is a fully-featured facility that has to exist for three days and then vanish — with no conduit in the ground, no structured cabling, and a load-in window measured in hours. That’s the worst possible environment for wired control and the best possible case for a device that orchestrates over the air. The Wireless Bobulator drops in as the nervous system for a pop-up venue, then packs back into a road case.

The Team

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Six people. One product. We are small on purpose, and every person below owns a hard problem from the whiteboard to the customer who unboxes the puck.

Priya

Real-time firmware lead · ex-QuantumScape