Field Notes
An engineering record, including the parts that went wrong.
Notes from the mobile platform, written down as they happen: what was observed, what was suspected, what was changed, and what followed.
A page of successes proves nothing. The useful part of deployment is the failures, because those are the only entries where anyone else’s build might avoid the same cost.
No notes published yet.
This section is built and waiting. Notes go up when they are written from something that actually happened — camera behaviour in cold weather, charging a battery pack through a Nova Scotia winter, condensation inside a sealed enclosure, the reason a thing was built one way rather than another.
There is nothing here yet because the mobile platform has not been running long enough to have produced a note worth publishing, and inventing a plausible one would defeat the purpose of publishing notes at all.
What a note looks like
Four steps, every time.
Every entry follows the same structure, because the structure is the argument. It keeps a guess labelled as a guess and forces the outcome to be written down — including when the outcome was that nothing improved.
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Observed What happened?
State the symptom in plain terms, before any cause is proposed.
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Suspected What appeared to cause it?
State the guess as a guess. This word is doing the work.
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Tested What did we change?
State what was changed, so the guess could be shown wrong.
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Result What happened afterwards?
State what happened afterwards. ‘Nothing changed’ is a valid result.
Field testing
Working in the same conditions?
CapnCoil takes product evaluation, field validation, and technical partnership work. If you are deploying hardware somewhere it has to survive, that is the conversation.