CONTEXT.md had grown by appending and contradicted itself (all four nodes vs six, a retracted CPU
figure, "no calibration", "nobody enrolled", "audio untested as a service", the Wi-Fi-off boot as
not done, a class the tracker replaced). Rewritten as one current-state document organised by
subsystem, with fresh measurements, the owner's decisions, the gotchas, the neck's arrival-day plan
and what is genuinely still open.
README: status, speakers not fitted, new-session note for Hermes, the calibration section (shipped
calibration, coverage hints, outlier dropping, --from-views), running the tests, the docs row.
HANDOFF.md gets a status banner listing where the original brief has drifted. CLAUDE.md starts at
CONTEXT.md. The echo-cancel config no longer talks about a Pi Zero, and the enclosure guide no longer
tells you to centre a servo with a tool that does not exist yet.
pi/network-config.example is a tracked, credentials-free first-boot template: the README pointed at
pi/50-cloud-init.yaml, which is gitignored and so missing from a fresh clone. The dead IdentityCache
(replaced by the tracker) is removed. Docstrings corrected: audio scope publishing, the MCP health
topics, and what the calibration tool does.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01AFN8nRRCiDiMN7ChBpHJhs
hermes_bringup starts the face, camera, face detector and audio levels from one
launch file with their parameters in robot.yaml, each node its own respawned
process, the face first and the others after start_delay. robot.service runs it
at boot, so everything is ROS and the face is up whenever the robot is powered.
Reboot-tested: all services and nodes return by themselves, the face draws at
about 28 s on the boot clock, the mic gain survives, nothing throttles.
Cut the CPU: the camera runs at 15 fps (20% of a core, vs 40% at 30), and the
detector went from 131% to 40% by pinning OpenCV to one thread (its DNN burns 3-4x
its elapsed time across cores), decoding the JPEG at half size, and re-identifying
a tracked face at most once a second. The audio scope is published only while
someone is speaking or listening.
A standalone face unit that skipped `ros2 launch` saved only 3.7 s and was dropped:
the owner prefers everything in ROS and is fine with up to a minute. trim-boot.sh
disables the unused snapd and ModemManager.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01AFN8nRRCiDiMN7ChBpHJhs
The face now treats /hermes/state as the agent's heartbeat: when nothing has been
heard for agent_timeout_s (10 s) it logs "agent gone" and sleeps, so "sleeping"
really means "no agent connected". It also logs every state change, which is how
a missed wake message was found: a one-off publish before discovery matches is
lost under volatile QoS.
The live log showed the face flickering between listening and idle about twice a
second, because the detector let go after 0.4 s. Hold is now 1.2 s so pauses
between words do not drop it, and the margin 7 dB over the adaptive floor (quiet
room noise peaks sit about 3 dB over it), with tests for both.
Confirmed by the owner on the real display: gaze directions, and a mouth that
follows their live voice proportionally.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01AFN8nRRCiDiMN7ChBpHJhs
audio_state taps the microphone and the speaker monitor with parec and publishes
levels, a speaking/listening/quiet activity, and trigger-locked waveform windows;
audio itself stays out of ROS. The activity detector calibrates its noise floor
at start-up and absorbs steady noise, so a room at -43 dBFS does not read as
"listening" forever, and it ignores the mic while the robot speaks.
The face arbitrates the state it shows: sleeping (agent side only, so room sound
never wakes a face that means "no agent connected") > speaking > listening >
thinking > idle, and draws the mouth from the real samples while fresh scope data
exists, auto-scaled so a quiet voice is still visible.
Checked: a tone played to the sink shows as `speaking` with the mic ignored. The
microphone-to-mouth path with a live voice is not yet confirmed.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01AFN8nRRCiDiMN7ChBpHJhs
kyleandClaude Sonnet 5.5