Family Robot — Your Device
Chip is the one who stays behind. You tell a device what you want in ordinary words — "if the tank drops below a quarter, run the pump for ten minutes" — and Chip turns that into a rule the device keeps for itself. Then Chip's help is over, and the rule carries on without a model, without the network, and without anyone watching. Built by the kids in the garage on a rainy Saturday, Chip is the part of the Kevin family that is still working when nothing else can be reached.
Describe the behaviour you want and Chip writes the rule. No condition builder, no scripting language, no menu of pre-baked automations to hunt through.
The finished rule lives on the device and is evaluated about twice a second in firmware. No model, no network, no daemon. Chip is only needed to write it, never to run it.
The AI loop is online and slow and only awake while you are asking for something. The rule loop is offline and fast and never sleeps. Splitting them is what makes the device dependable rather than merely clever.
Chip keeps notes per device — which tank is which, what "the back field" means, what you called things last time. Ask the same device for something later and it still has the context.
Ask a device for its rules and it answers from firmware, not from a copy on a server. What you read is what the hardware is really doing.
The authoring half can run against a hosted model or one on your own machine, picked per request. The half that keeps your equipment running does not use a model at all.
The kids pooled their skills one weekend. Kevin handled the plumbing, Max wired the hardware, Walt supervised, Mona watched, Lattice carried the messages. What they were arguing about was whether a device should have to phone home to do its job. It shouldn't. The result was Chip — a little robot small enough to live on the device and stubborn enough to keep going when the rest of the family is unreachable. Some of the patterns in Chip are older than any of the kids. They came from somewhere else, from someone who built things like this before any of them existed.
Chip's entry point is Vera Home. Download it and the rest of the family follows.
Download Vera Home