Development journal

What changed, what worked, and what still does not.

The journal is the chronological engineering record behind the public project - hardware, software, decisions, failures, and the limit of every result.

Latest update / J-016

Seeed Studio components are here. The head build is next.

A thank-you to Seeed Studio, the delivered components, our new 3D printer and the design direction for the head and future body. Hindsight integration is the current software focus; hardware work is targeted for the week of 28 September. J-016 records an arrival and a plan, not a completed prototype.

Read J-016

Latest first

Real progress, with the known limit kept beside it.

J-01622 September 2026Hardware arrival and collaboration

Delivered Seeed Studio components, including reSpeaker Flex, Orbbec Gemini 2, servos and a display, laid out before integration

Building the Evopien head with Seeed Studio: the hardware has arrived

The components from our collaboration with Seeed Studio are here, and so is our Bambu Lab A1. A thank-you to the team helping us build the first physical head, a look at the concept designs, and the next steps after the Hindsight memory integration.

Completed: Seeed Studio components received and photographed; Bambu Lab A1 received and set up in the workshop.
Known limit: Hardware arrival is preparation, not a working head. Hindsight integration and testing are in progress. The head and body images are concepts; the real build may differ. Next week’s hardware start is a target, subject to the remaining checks.

Permanent record RELATEDCurrent development

J-01516 September 2026Governed memory checkpoint · Historical

Original conceptual illustration of separate memory records and permission boundaries around one Core

From a working demo to governed memory: one week building the next layer

The 9–16 September engineering review: local/cloud demo recovery, durable synthetic memory, reviewed English/Spanish input and governed speech. The latest operator-reported backend run passed 903 required methods; broader cognition, voice and Alpha gates remain open.

Completed: Synthetic PostgreSQL persistence, current-rights checks, reviewed correction/deletion and bilingual task/time workflows across restart; bounded physical interruption recovery on its earlier exact source.
Known limit: Fictional-data engineering evidence, not a real-user Alpha. A dated update records the narrow bilingual recovery diagnostic; full G8/G9, deployment security and independent recovery remain open. Actual-model probes retain failures. Engineering main still preserves the separate demo freeze.

Permanent record RELATEDSee current development

J-0149 September 2026Integrated demo freeze · Historical

AI-generated conceptual artwork of sound, vision and an internet constellation converging around one luminous core

Voice, vision and internet: one frozen foundation, local and cloud

424 engineering commits bring full-duplex conversation, selected live and recent-history vision, and public research into one Thor demo. The baseline is frozen and merged into main, with local and cloud profiles. Governed memory and stronger permission boundaries are next.

Completed: One console and terminal runtime connect bilingual speech, interruption, pause/resume, selected vision, local James/DDG retrieval and optional Groq/Exa services. The September 9 cloud demo exercised these paths and stopped cleanly.
Known limit: Founder-accepted engineering freeze, not formal acceptance. MS-07, MS-08 and MS-09 remain open; routing defects, source freshness, latency tails and complete latest-local-profile qualification remain. Session recall is not governed durable memory.

Permanent record RELATEDSee the current development state

J-0135 September 2026Thor voice + vision checkpoint · Historical

AI-generated conceptual illustration of camera frames and an acoustic waveform meeting in one core

Bilingual voice meets visual context: the next Thor checkpoint

Explicit English and Spain-Spanish switching is frozen, continuous perception has been exercised, and Qwen has received a current camera image. The latest branch adds a 15-second visual-context window to ordinary turns, with physical qualification still ahead.

Completed: 235 commits since the previous engineering cutoff cover conversation continuity, long questions, short follow-ups, explicit bilingual control, C920 recovery and freshness, adaptive perception with PVA tracking, current-image grounding, and bounded recent-video experiments.
Known limit: MS-08 and MS-09 acceptance gates remain open. CP09-S measured 1.524 seconds median speech-end to first generated PCM, with 1.803 seconds P95. Recent-video motion tests failed their rubric; the 15-second candidate has not yet been physically qualified, and integrated voice/video latency is unmeasured.

Permanent record RELATEDSee the current development state

J-0122 September 2026Thor engineering checkpoint · Historical

Five days rebuilding the Thor voice loop: a 1.37-second median and the gates still open

Since J-011, Evopien has moved from separate realtime components to a physically exercised Thor speech path, frozen a Core-owned conversation lifecycle, re-architected the Qwen history path so the old cache cliff did not recur in the 100-prompt text-only test or short eight-response physical run, and reduced median speech-end-to-first-PCM latency to 1.3705 seconds.

Completed: ConversationLedger now owns spoken-only history, WAIT/CONTINUE/STOP and generation leases; Smart Turn overlaps Cohere transcription; a derived open-session memory index is separated from a bounded cache-stable Qwen working set; and one natural Qwen stream now feeds locally framed Scylla speech through a single playback owner. A 100,000-turn synthetic-history text-only qualification held later Qwen TTFT at 244.3 ms P50, and the latest physical run held Qwen TTFT near 212 ms P50.
Known limit: The 1.3705-second result is a median from detected speech end to first generated PCM, not an independently measured acoustic hearing timestamp. P95 was 1.7971 seconds and failed the ≤1.3-second gate; only eight Qwen turns were measured, false-barge cleanup and temporary generated residue remained open, and the paired bilingual natural-duplex exit corpus has not passed.

Permanent record RELATEDSee the current development state

J-01128 August 2026Thor engineering checkpoint · Historical

Closed NVIDIA Jetson AGX Thor Developer Kit box on a round table

Thor arrived: what worked, what failed, and the realtime stack now being integrated

Since the pre-arrival record, Jetson AGX Thor has been brought up, the standalone audio and camera foundations have been reproduced, a bounded Qwen3-Omni reference has been completed and retired from active conversation, and the governed Core identity gate has passed. Evopien is now integrating a modular English and Spain-Spanish realtime stack.

Completed: The Thor platform is operational; MS-03 passed for its declared XVF/Pebble AEC and C920 fixtures; MS-04 received a conditional pass for its exact fixed-corpus bilingual multimodal reference; and MS-06 completed one creation-with-lineage event. Nemotron ASR, turn-intelligence, Qwen3.8/SGLang, Magpie/NanoCodec, and cancellable playback have since been exercised as separate experimental slices.
Known limit: MS-08 remains open. The complete ASR-to-Core-to-cognition-to-speech loop is not integrated or validated, physical acoustic stop latency and Castilian voice quality remain open, and MS-09 continuous scene-state vision has not started. This is not Alpha, production, internet, or powered-motion readiness.

Permanent record RELATEDSee the current development state

J-01026 August 2026Architecture transition · Historical

From Orin Nano to Jetson AGX Thor: rebuilding the backbone before the machine arrives

Evopien is moving from its first Orin Nano prototype to a clean-room Jetson AGX Thor programme. The earlier implementation is pinned as historical engineering evidence; the Thor generation starts from governed requirements, explicit verification gates, and a new identity with disclosed lineage rather than inherited runtime state.

Completed: A new Thor-native project baseline now defines 102 requirements, 16 evidence-gated milestones, 30 tracked risks, source authority, identity lineage, fail-closed interfaces, and a hardware-arrival sequence. The active repository passed its host-independent baseline checks before publication.
Known limit: The Jetson AGX Thor has not yet been received or verified. Qwen3-Omni is only the first local-provider candidate; no Thor model, audio, camera, networking, performance, memory, identity-activation, or physical-behaviour result is claimed. Founder-review documents and release gates remain open.

Permanent record RELATEDSee the Thor development state

J-00920 August 2026Engineering milestone · Historical

Voice V1 is frozen: the next milestone is conversational presence

The Orin-generation experimental Voice V1 was frozen after representative clean physical turns reached about 2.15 seconds from user end-of-speech to first meaningful audio, with a fastest retained turn near 1.51 seconds. This remains historical Orin evidence, not the current Thor runtime.

Completed: At that checkpoint, the bilingual voice baseline combined persistent six-thread Parakeet ASR, Qwen3.5-4B, selective-INT8 Piper speech, XVF3800 hardware echo cancellation, hardware-AEC-assisted barge-in, qualified endpointing, 233 passing tests plus two subtests, and a tagged recovery anchor.
Known limit: About two seconds is a representative result, not a guaranteed ceiling. Conversational Presence R0 is still research: no vocal backchannel, visual nod, reliable spontaneous end-of-turn policy, robust multi-speaker ownership, governed persistent memory, or physical actuation is claimed yet.

Permanent record RELATEDSee the current development state

J-00817 August 2026Engineering checkpoint · Historical

From local voice to an integrated head: the 14-17 August build

Between 14 and 17 August, the 8 GB Orin Nano head gained hardware-AEC-assisted simultaneous capture/playback, bilingual interruption, Silero speech qualification, fresh on-demand visual turns, a DeepStream/RF-DETR/NvDCF perception mode, and observe-only direction telemetry. The retained suite reached 188 passing tests.

Completed: That local head could hear, answer, be interrupted, switch between English and Spanish, capture a fresh C920 frame for visual questions, and run a separately preserved continuous detector/tracker pipeline. Direction-of-arrival telemetry was integrated without allowing unreliable direction data to reject speech.
Known limit: Robust multi-speaker ownership is not solved; DoA produced sustained wrong directions in live testing. Governed persistent memory, the complete multi-user privacy proof, fluid low-swap performance, launcher lifecycle hardening, audio-video active-speaker fusion, and physical actuation also remain unfinished.

Permanent record RELATEDSee the current development state

J-00714 August 2026Working milestone · Historical

Evopien can now hear, answer and be interrupted

At this Orin-generation milestone, the first Evopien head prototype ran a local voice loop: microphone input, speech recognition, local Qwen reasoning, streamed speech synthesis, hands-free turn-taking, and barge-in cancellation.

Completed: Local microphone capture, whisper.cpp transcription, Qwen3.5-4B reasoning, Piper speech, streaming output, hands-free turn-taking, and barge-in interruption worked together through the archived Orin-generation Core runtime.
Known limit: The C920 camera and Qwen vision work independently, but live conversational vision is not connected yet. Governed persistent memory, the full multi-user privacy proof, ESP32 behaviour, and physical actuation also remain future milestones.

Permanent record RELATEDSee the current development state

J-00612 August 2026Project record · Historical

The first Evopien Jetson workstation during the working head and Core milestone

The first canonical Evopien identity now persists across repeated runs

The Orin head platform established GPU acceleration, live camera capture, microphone input, speaker output, and a local Evopien Core software foundation. Its predecessor identity was created in persistent storage and returned unchanged across repeated application runs.

Completed: Head-platform I/O and GPU execution were validated, the Core API and persistent database stack ran, and the predecessor identity was retrieved across repeated bootstrap runs instead of being recreated. It is not imported or activated on Thor.
Known limit: This record predates the local voice milestone. Governed persistent memory, the complete multi-user privacy proof, conversational vision, audit/governance memory flows, and physical actuation remain to be implemented and tested.

Permanent record

J-00511 August 2026Project record · Historical

NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano Super used for the first Evopien head workstation

JetPack 7.2 is running on the first Jetson head workstation

JetPack 7.2 with Jetson Linux 39.2 ran from the 1 TB NVMe drive on the first Jetson Orin Nano Super workstation. This historical record documents the ISO installation, first-boot issue, system state, and then-open validation work.

Completed: The official JetPack ISO was installed to NVMe, Ubuntu 24.04 reached the desktop, the NVIDIA package pass completed, and the first workstation record was created. Exact CUDA, Python, Docker, audio, and camera checks remain explicit follow-up items.
Known limit: This is a setup and implementation record, not yet evidence of an integrated head, Milestone M1, or a validated physical prototype.

Permanent record

J-0045 August 2026Project record · Historical

Repository created and implementation started

Project control moved from planning into an active private repository and initial implementation work began.

Completed: The repository exists and development has started.
Known limit: No public commit reference or M1 test result is attached, so this remains a project record rather than demonstrated evidence.

Permanent record

J-0034 August 2026Project record · Historical

Core prototyping hardware purchased and placed in transit

The Jetson compute platform, ESP32 controller, breadboards, measurement tools, power equipment, and supporting prototyping supplies were purchased for the first stationary-head programme.

Completed: Core hardware was purchased and entered the delivery phase.
Known limit: Purchasing equipment is preparation, not proof of a physical prototype.

Permanent record

J-0022 August 2026Controlling draft · Historical

The first build was narrowed to a credible proof

Alpha v0.1 defined the smallest system worth building and the gates required before partnership readiness.

Completed: Requirements, stages, release gates, and M1 were drafted.
Known limit: Alpha v0.1 remains a founder-review draft and its requirements remain unproven.

Permanent record

J-0011 August 2026Approved decision · Historical

Foundation Specification v1.2 approved

The mission, architecture, relationship principles, safety boundaries, and claim rules were consolidated.

Completed: A controlling strategic foundation was approved.
Known limit: Approval defines direction. It does not prove any planned capability.

Permanent record RELATEDRead the public commitments

How evidence labels work

Decision: An approved direction or controlling principle.
Project record: A dated engineering or setup update.
Prototype: A working implementation in a defined test environment.
Demonstrated: A behaviour observed against a stated test.
Historical: A dated result preserved from a superseded generation; not current-system evidence.

SYSTEM TRACEPreparing this route

Preserving identity and page context while the next view is assembled.