A fall at home can go unnoticed for hours. Wearable alarm buttons only help if the person is wearing one and can press it. CareNest needs nothing worn: it watches the room and raises the alarm itself
We blew out our radar sensor. None of us had done much electronics before, and we didn't yet understand how the components fit together: which pins carry power, why every part needs a shared ground, and how easy it is to short something by accident. One wrong connection and the sensor went silent for good. It was a painful but very effective lesson.
A radar can't tell direction. One LD2410C only reports that someone is there and how far away, not where. We made the head "wiggle" left and right and turn toward whichever side hears them better.
Tracking that hunts back and forth. The camera always sees a moment late, so a motor with momentum overshot people standing still. We switched to a motion that glides a fraction of the remaining way each step and never swings past.
Hardware surprises: a USB driver that garbled uploads, a strapping pin that silently broke flashing, and loose jumper connections that looked fine but weren't. We learned to test one wire at a time.
Keeping it private: doing all the vision on the phone instead of a server meant optimizing models to run in a mobile browser.
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