Building the record before the build

The first job was to give RC-01 a record that could grow with it. The Project Book brought hardware, build sessions, configuration checkpoints, issues, decisions, tests, and supporting media into one engineering history.

Procurement stayed separate. Purchase and delivery information belongs in the parts spreadsheet; what we installed, changed, tested, and learned belongs in the engineering record. That separation lets a component keep its identity even when its role or implementation changes.

The planned bench stack centered on a Raspberry Pi 5, active cooling, a 256 GB microSD card, a touch display, and audio hardware. At this checkpoint, the display, storage card, and several accessories were recorded as received while the compute, cooling, and power shipment was still in transit. Those are historical receiving states, not the current inventory.

Initial commissioning was a plan: assemble the minimum stack, establish boot and thermal behavior, and verify display, touch, and audio. The blank test records were deliberately left unqualified. Writing an acceptance criterion was the beginning of a test, not its completion.

The next step was to turn those planned checks into dated observations, keeping failures and corrections alongside successful results.