About

F451 Labs is a personal field archive — one person’s record of the things built here and what they taught. The material is IoT hardware, microcontrollers, and the software that makes physical things talk to networks. Not every book. This one.

The record splits three ways. Directives are projects: numbered, documented, built to run. They read like field reports because that is what they are. Dispatches are the working notes — observations, progress, the occasional argument with a datasheet. Filed is the reference shelf: climate data, educational material, scientific record, and best practices. It stays because it is inconvenient to ignore.

The name is borrowed from Fahrenheit 451, and the allegiance is with the Book People — the ones who carried what was worth carrying. Read from their side, The Record Persists means the careful record, the honest failure mode, the schematic shared rather than hoarded.

Standing practice

Adopted as house practice, checkable by anyone:

• A power budget is published for every deployed device — idle draw, active draw, duty cycle, annual kWh.
• Expected service life is stated at deployment, and the actual figure is recorded at retirement.
• A repair log is kept: what failed, what was replaced, what was salvaged.
• A disposal note is recorded before any device is marked retired. No device leaves the fleet undocumented.
• Calibration and method are published alongside any environmental dataset, without exception.