Resuming PETI Work After Some State Loss

Last Updated: 2025-01-13 00:00:00 -0600

As is the running tradition around here, I can open this post by hooping my thumbs through my suspenders and saying “Boy, it sure has been a while since we had a PETI update, huh?”. For a project that’s been running for multiple years now, the progress certainly seems slow when you view it on the aggregate timeline. That’s why I have good news: the next firmware update is coming soon!

The main thrust of the situation is this - to better lay the foundation for the 0.5.0 update, and in the interest of getting something done this side of march, I will be releasing a Firmware Version 0.4.1 in the near future.

This smaller version update is simply a bug fix update that will address a few fairly major issues with the current version:

  • Corrects a bug currently present in the Rock Paper Scissors minigame which causes the toy to enter an unrecoverable hang state (issue 38).
  • Corrects a freshly-introduced bug that can cause the pet to evolve through it’s entire life-cycle in a single day. (issue 47).
  • Corrects a freshly-introduced bug that causes spurious alerts when waking up from the save-state after a device reset (issue 46).

Issue #38 is already resolved (and required more or less completely re-writing the portions of the minigame that interface with DISPLAY_FRAME), and future work on both the DISPLAY library and the documentation surrounding development practices will hopefully shore up that fix and avoid the issue reappearing in the future, because it isn’t the first time issue 38 was reported - this was originally happening an entire firmware feature version ago, back in 0.3.0!.

Right now I’m loosely targeting mid-to-late February for the release of the bugfix update. Between now and then I’ll also make some grand pronouncements about 0.5.0, and the future of the project in terms of getting a new batch of Dev Kits available on our Tindie store.

What’s This About State Loss

Unfortunately, back in the october-november timeframe, a number of the project boards used for PETI were made unreachable through the normal github UI, thanks to their push to force their significantly inferior version 2 of Projects into mainstream usage. When this happened, a lot of information about the current state of the project was lost, and had to be reconstructed from project notes. That’s not the only real reason for the delay, but it did cost a few good sesssions that otherwise would have gone into writing the fixes for the bugs above.

Though, if we’re really being honest as well, another huge part of the delay is that at around the same time, and even earlier, I had taken on a series of heavy projects through my day job that left me not feeling much up to working on technical projects in my spare hours. In fact, the entire back quarter of 2024 was quite unpleasant, and for that reason I didn’t do much more than eat hot chip and play CRPGs where I didn’t have to be myself for a few hours every night. Now that I’m back on the horse, we should see some improved velocity in the project, if only because it’s actually being worked on again.

EDIT: Just a few days after this post, the work wrapped up on the update faster than expected and it is now available here.


If you wanted to show your support financially for Arcana Labs projects like PETI, but don’t need a virtual pet development kit, your best avenue is through the pathways detailed on our support page.

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