Spring Growing Season = PETI Updates!
Last Updated: 2026-04-06 05:00:00 -0500
I’ve had a particularly lucky break in my professional life, and I’m going to be starting a brand new position with a new-to-me company in a few days. One of the practical upshots of this, though, is that it’s suddenly practical to pursue finishing PETI again. I know I said that I wouldn’t completely abandon the firmware work while I waited for the hardware work to be practical again, but I guess I was mistaken in that regard. Apart for some pie-eyed speculations, the code has sat largely untouched since last October and apart from some git commit messages and very sparse notebook comments, I have no idea what the state of the project is.
And, in keeping with the new stream schedule, I will at the minimum be working on the pet in public on Tuesdays at 7 PM Atlantic/Halifax time on my Twitch livestreams. We’re going to revive the semi-tradition of that being the technical projects livestream slot now that I have a technical project to work on.
For all my griping, it’s my hope that we could start the development of the 0.6.0 firmware patch relatively quickly, but right now writing this post I genuinely have no idea what the state of that development branch is right now. I doubt we’ll have to roll all the way back to stable and then redo the work, but it’ll be a bit of archeology to find it.
PETI is an ongoing project to develop a 90s-style virtual pet using mostly modern microcontrollers and other hardware. It’s one of Arcana Labs’ longest-running projects, and the project materials have been available as FOSS and OSHW (to the limitations of licensing agreements with other vendors) since the project’s beginning. For over 5 years at this point, the project has largely been a one-person passion project to make a particular object exist, and in doing so hopefully do some small part to democratize that process. Your support of the project is greatly appreciated.