This one started as one of my best weeks and ended as one of my worst. I got more done on NEURA in four days than I usually do in two, and then on the fifth day my computer died and took all of that momentum with it.
The software push was real. I roughly doubled what NEURA can do by voice, adding well over a hundred new commands, so you can ask it about almost anything and it just handles it. It reads out its own wifi, its temperature, your goals, your routines, and it plays little games with you when you are bored. Small pieces, but a lot of them, and together they make NEURA feel deep instead of like a demo.
The two I am proudest of are bigger. You can now ask NEURA to draw something and it paints the image right on its face, with no setup and no key needed to start. And I built a tutorial mode, where NEURA brings up a little animated version of itself and walks you through everything it can do, one piece at a time. That was the moment it stopped feeling like a tool and started feeling like a guide.
Then Thursday happened. My main machine, the one I build and deploy everything from, just stopped. No boot, no warning, nothing. Every bit of that new work was finished but stuck, because I could not push any of it to the robot without that computer.
I will be honest, I lost a few hours to being angry about it. When you are a team of one, your machine is not just a tool, it is the whole shop. Losing it in the middle of a sprint feels like getting the wind knocked out of you.
But sitting still was not an option, and a dead computer does not stop you from working with your hands. So I made a call that turned into the plan for the next week. If I cannot build the software, I will build the body. Time to print.