Shelving PETI, Temporarily, To Save the Lab

Last Updated: 2025-06-08 00:00:00 -0500

I haven’t really wanted to admit it to anyone, much less myself, but for a while now it’s been painfully clear that I am mentally, temporally, and financially overcommitted. It wouldn’t even be wrong to say that I’ve been in that state for a few years now. But recently, something has changed in my life, and that means I need to do something I normally have the luxury of avoiding - cognitive load shedding. Unfortunately, that does mean, for a short time, work on PETI cannot continue.

The Problems

To a certain very real extent, PETI is three projects in a trench coat. I would argue that it has been the most technically complex, mentally demanding, and financially expensive project I’ve taken on to date. The barriers to entry for electronics design have fallen considerably over the years, to a point where someone completely self-taught in most of these areas can (very arguably) do something like this. Over the run of the project I’ve learned the C programming language, the specifics of my manufacturer’s compilation toolchain, how to design electronic circuits and then how to turn those schematics into schematics for printed circuit boards, and how to turn those into the files manufacturers need, and more weird esoterica about one specific microprocessor architecture than I was entirely prepared for. It’s been a rollercoaster of a project, but not a very sustainable one, and while I’m having a rip-roar of a time, you can’t spend all your life at a party.

The Revision D Development Kit

For something like a year now, I’ve been promising that a new revision to the development kit hardware, the “Revision D” (mostly a revision of the back board). The main thing that’s been stopping that from happening is a desire to offer these kits for sale as kits rather than merely the bare boards (though the bare boards would still be an option, obviously). There’s a few problems with that, though. This isn’t the most practical thing to turn around and do. I would have to invest in the boards and components, and packaging for those components, and even where the boards are sold as-is without any kind of fitness certifications, I’d still have to make sure to know a bit about any relevant laws involved in the import and export of electronics. It’s a lot of cognitive load and a big start-up cost when money is (in all honesty) unreasonably tight, and expected to get tighter.

The development kit also, objectively, sucks as a project. Right now, even with the Revision D design, if I wasn’t already involved in the project I’m not sure I’d get involved in the hardware. It’s not enough to buy the kit and assemble it yourself, but there’s also two TI components called for that are both not ignorably cheap, and I can’t even resell them to you. What’s really properly called for there is one of two things:

A complete redesign of the development kit to turn both the backboard and the controller board into a single board, including all the revision D changes (compared to revision C) as well as the needed hardware to support the LCD (including the LCD itself), and/or;
Taking a huge detour to develop some kind of emulation layer that would let you build and playtest code directly on your computer so that the hardware itself isn’t a barrier to entry to participating in the project.

And if I’m being honest, I don’t have the cognitive capacity for either right now, which means the hardware itself is on standby basically until I can free up some brain again.

The Firmware Itself

PETI’s firmware status right now is in between two feature versions. We just recently released version 0.5.0 which added the hygeine features to the game, and I’m maybe a quarter of the way into the expected feature set for 0.6.0, which adds a bunch of the health features: the ability to get sick, the ability to treat sickness, and the introduction of mortality to the game. It’s also finally going to reconnect a bunch of the evolutionary systems that were orphaned, though it probably won’t add a non-debugger route to reach the new pet states, at least not in full.

It’s probable that at some point in the balance of 2025 I finish writing the 0.6.0 update. This largely ties into the mental capacity problems I’m having, but development of this featureset is taking longer than anticipated simply because I am only infrquently able to touch the codebase, and that sort of development workflow leads to a lot of lost state (and having to recover that state) each time you sit down, so I need to wait for a slack period when I can really just hammer it out in one burst.

It’s possible, maybe even probable, that in between now and then I create enough cognitive slack to keep going. At this point it’s possible to develop basically all but one of the outstanding features on the original roadmap to 1.0 on the revision C kit, and I could arguably even hack my way around making a sort of “C.5” prototype to bodge in the changed audio circuit and finish the outstanding audio features without ever upgrading the hardware again.

But I’m really not going to commit to any timeframe for any of those updates. Again, cognitive slack. I explain this in some more detail later, but the kind of work I do for PETI is the kind of mental work I have the absolute least capacity for right now. Once 0.6.0 is baked together and stable, I’m probably not touching the codebase at all (unless a major bug gets reported) until I free up some real capacity, and I don’t know when that’ll be.

The Project’s End Game

Anyone who has handled the current development prototype, or seen me handle it on a stream, knows that PETI is a far cry from the kind of device it’s emulating. The development kit is, by both necessity and expediency, big, bulky, and fragile. A goal of the project right from the outset was to eventually create a “production” version, being smaller, largely SMD tech, suitable for much the same use case as the toys of the 90s it emulates: a pocketable toy for daily carry.

Obviously this is an even bigger logistics and finance hurdle both to design and actually produce, so it’s definitely stalled until I both have the time and energy to do it and actually have the call to do it. I don’t want sunk cost sending me chasing after this for another half-decade if it turns out that I’m not really interested in being a toy manufacturer. If not, I shouldn’t get into boutique electronics manufacture just because of five years of sunk cost fallacy driving it.

The Solution, and Next Steps at the Lab

Unfortunately, the only solution to “I can’t do this anymore” is to stop doing the thing. I am in a position in my life now where I simply must shed, as quickly as possible, cognitive and executive load. That doesn’t mean I need to can the project forever, or shut down the lab, but PETI is currently the most unamenable type of cognitive load for me. Much like how physical exercise can be subcategorized, not all cognitive loads are the same. I can quite easily still take on some reading projects and writing projects, but in-depth and extended sessions of technical creation and troubleshooting are past my current capacity. The work I get paid to do is not quite at all like PETI, but it’s using enough of the same brain circuitry that they share capacity, and unfortunately, I need too much of that capacity for the day-job right now, because rent is due on the first!

So, the short version for you is this: there won’t be a new PETI update for a while, and when there is, it’ll probably just be the 0.6.0 firmware release. Some time after that (beyond my direct control), we’ll then be able to very excitedly say that PETI is back on, and it will be finished, at least as far as finishing writing the firmware goes.

In the meantime though, the lab is not dead. There’s still going to be the odd essay or announcement. I think we’re getting very close to releasing The Game for Scribes, for example.