Real Scans on Real Hardware -- and the Bug That Took a While to Catch

2026-08-18 21:04:34 · Manley Chastain, Founder and Developer

The timing system is actually catching real scans now -- a member's badge, a bird's leg band -- read live off the antenna, not simulated. That's been the goal since day one, and this week it finally happened on the real unit sitting in the loft. Getting there wasn't clean. Once the reader was live, a strange bug showed up: a band that had already been read correctly would sometimes get caught again and again while sweeping more bands past the antenna, like the system had forgotten it already had that one. It wasn't actually forgetting -- the data underneath was right every time -- but the screen kept jumping back and reacting anyway, which looked and felt exactly like the reader had lost track of what it had already scanned. Chasing it down meant pulling the actual read history off the unit and watching, second by second, what really happened during a real sweep -- not guessing from the code alone. The reader was right. The screen just didn't know when to leave something alone. Once that was clear, the fix was small: stop interrupting the screen for a band that's already been handled, and only react when something's genuinely new. It's a small thing to describe and it mattered a lot to fix -- the difference between a timing system a fancier can trust mid-sweep and one that makes them double-check every read. Real hardware surfaces problems that never show up in a demo, and this was one of them. More of this is coming as the reader keeps getting exercised for real -- come see what's actually built and working today.