This is the founding entry. It records the logic the lab applies to everything that follows, so that later Directives can assume it rather than restate it.
F451 Labs exists to build small, legible systems — sensors, microcontrollers, the software that reads them — and to write down what happened. The premise is narrow on purpose. A project is worth a Directive only if it ran, produced data, and taught something that survives the writing-up.
Scope
A Directive is a project. It is numbered when it begins and closed when the hardware is in service or formally abandoned. Anything looser — a note, an argument with a datasheet, a half-formed idea — belongs in a Dispatch, not here. The distinction is not ceremony. It keeps the numbered record trustworthy: every Directive points at something that exists.
Method
The method is unremarkable and deliberately so. Pick a measurable thing. Choose the
smallest hardware that can measure it without lying. Log at an interval the phenomenon
actually warrants — 60s for a slow room, faster only with a reason. Persist to
SQLite, replicate off-box, and read it back over a single origin. No moving part is
added until the absence of it is felt.
Numbers are reported in the units they were taken in. A reading of 21.4 °C is not
rounded to 21 because the display looks tidier; the precision is part of the record.
Constraints
Three colors. No rounded corners, no shadows, no gradients — depth comes from contrast and a hairline rule. One database engine. No background daemon the runtime cannot account for. These are not aesthetic preferences dressed as rules; they are a budget. Each constraint removes a decision that would otherwise have to be re-litigated on every project, which is the only way a one-person lab ships more than one thing.
Disposition
The work proceeds in order. The next Directives bring hardware online and the telemetry service that reads it. Until a unit reports, its Directive carries a placeholder and nothing more — the record does not run ahead of the facts.
Preservation of order is an operating constraint, not a slogan.