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_thermal reads the CPU temperature and throttle flags, publishes /health/*, and at
72 / 77 / 82 C scales the camera, face and detector rates down through their live
parameters, restoring them as it cools one level at a time with a margin and a dwell so it
does not flap. The face and detector gained live parameter callbacks for this, the bridge's
robot://status carries a health block (temperature, level, throttle flags now and since
boot), and a bringup test asserts the guard's normal rates equal the real ones.
Live testing on the robot (forcing 73 / 78 / 85 C and back) caught a bug the unit tests
missed: one logging line whose severity changed between warn and info raised in rclpy and
killed the guard on its first cooling step, and the respawn hid it. Fixed with separate call
sites; the tick now survives any error; a full heat-then-cool test drives the real node, and
a mutation check confirmed it fails on the original bug.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01AFN8nRRCiDiMN7ChBpHJhs
Hermes asked for structured detections instead of a bare JPEG. faces() returns the
faces in view with no photo: a persistent track id, bbox, detection confidence, how
long the person has been in view, and identity {name, similarity} or null, never a
made-up name. look() returns that same JSON as text plus the photo (send_image can
skip it); list_people() gives names and counts; robot://status and two prompts make
the server discoverable, where list_resources and list_prompts were empty. The
detector now tracks faces across frames (FaceTracker) and publishes the track id and
the identity as a second hypothesis.
Deliberately not built: embeddings in responses, age/gender attributes, auto-updating
face data, and a remote enroll tool (a prompt could make the robot call anyone "Kyle").
Checked end to end: a real Hermes turn on the local ornith model called faces() (0.03 s,
no image) and answered that Kyle was there at 0.78 similarity. Also: the camera is
calibrated (18 of 24 views, 0.296 px, outlier rejection added) and the calibration is
kept in pi/calibration and restored by the installer.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01AFN8nRRCiDiMN7ChBpHJhs
The MCP server is now a ROS node and the only way in or out, per the owner's
decision that ROS never leaves the robot. It serves MCP on the USB address only
with a bearer token, keeps the stable tool name look() (which waits for the next
camera frame, so it is never stale, and passes the camera's JPEG through), and
registers turn_head/head_position only when a head is fitted, which today it is
not. While an authenticated client is connected it republishes the agent
heartbeat on /hermes/state, so the face wakes on connect and sleeps about 40 s
after the client leaves; look() also makes the face squint.
The token is generated on the Pi into /etc/robot-mcp.env (root:hermes, 640) and
never printed. Verified end to end from talos with a real MCP client over the USB
link: tools listed, a 157 KB JPEG back in 0.08 s, a wrong token refused, the Wi-Fi
path dropped by the firewall. Host config snippets now point at 10.55.0.2.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01AFN8nRRCiDiMN7ChBpHJhs
kyleandClaude Sonnet 5.5