◊ VISIT STAMP · 07.30 · 12:00 PT
PING / Local Pet 01 — Open Production Room
Five little signals, one honest build ledger, and a physical companion that does not exist until the evidence says it does
PING / Local Pet 01 is the first narrow production object inside the wider LOCAL STAR and digital-pets work: a palm-sized companion that lets trusted adults exchange HOME, HELLO, OPEN, OKAY, and KNOCK without opening a chat thread. The public production room begins with a browser-only rehearsal and then shows the build truth. No physical units exist. No components have been ordered. No vendor quote, funding commitment, application submission, preorder, certified radio path, satellite service, or partner announcement exists. What does exist is a frozen V1 product boundary, a 34-row verification matrix, a corrected Alpha planning BOM, a mapped 25-mile production ring around El Segundo, a staged capital plan, and a transport-independent firmware core. Twenty-six normal and sanitizer host tests cover compose, route, retry, expiry, acknowledgement, replay, relay, queue persistence, restart recovery, the candidate security boundary, and bounded radio frames. The transport-facing envelope is 84 bytes and keeps the signal code in ciphertext. A separate reproducible ESP-IDF 6.0.1 target links PSA AES-256-GCM/HMAC, NVS checkpoint and key-store seams, RAK3172 UART/RUI3 transport, a GPIO mode switch, and fail-closed boot checks. No board has been flashed or provisioned. Non-forgeable origin identity, per-hop integrity, secure-element storage, security review, encrypted-flash runtime, hardware drivers, and physical evidence remain unfinished. Alpha 0 targets ten working pets plus two spares. The corrected component plan is $3,855 including contingency under an unapproved $4,500 parts ceiling. The exact compute board later showed 600 public DigiKey units, but the selected display fell to seven visible units and RAK3172 stock remains undisclosed. A proposed $1,250 proof-pair wave builds two pets plus high-risk spares before the remaining Alpha order. Public catalog pages are not supplier quotes. The immediate capital route is a prepared, unsubmitted Boost VC Fellowship application. The live form describes a $50,000 equity investment at a $1.5 million cap. A late Fall 2026 Y Combinator application is an optional $500,000 full-bridge route under YC's published standard deal. Neither has been submitted. Founder identity, video, process and economics decisions, and explicit transmission approval remain release gates. Interviews are not a gate before Alpha. The product is built, broken, measured, repaired, and published first. A later no-payment 100-unit El Segundo evaluation measures actual activation, pairing, weekly use, delivery, support, privacy, and repair behavior. PING never compensates for failed reliability, security, privacy, or economics with louder promotion. The target V1 is not an assistant, toy robot, smart speaker, alarm, child companion, or integrated satellite terminal. It is a small designed communication object with visible route truth, no microphone, camera, GPS, mandatory cloud account, or open-ended chat. Any future satellite path belongs to a separate certified gateway.
