This week our home-security product got a real name — Vigil — its own site, its own domain, and, most importantly, its first proof on physical hardware.
The idea behind Vigil: sense presence and motion through a house using the WiFi signals already passing through it, via channel-state information read by small ESP32 microcontroller nodes. No cameras, no microphones pointed at your family. The radio environment of a room changes when a person moves through it, and that change is measurable.
Until yesterday that was theory plus synthetic data, and I'd said so plainly in our internal records: zero live-hardware proof. Yesterday it stopped being theory.
The moment it worked
Two nodes, freshly flashed — the firmware compiled clean on its first-ever real build, which never happens — one beaconing, one receiving, streaming a hundred frames a second to the Mac. Baseline noise sat steady. Then a hand waved between the nodes, and the motion metric spiked cleanly to 1.7 times baseline, every pass, on live radio data.
By afternoon it was a five-node fleet covering four rooms, all links streaming simultaneously. The app now runs on real sensor data end to end: per-room presence, occupant tracking with hysteresis so a person walking between rooms hands off cleanly, and a house map the system derives itself from inter-node signal measurements — you plug in nodes, and the house figures out its own layout.
A ship-blocking discovery about trust
One finding worth sharing for anyone building Mac software that listens on the network: macOS's application firewall silently drops inbound traffic to apps that aren't notarized. We measured it directly — the identical binary received zero datagrams when unsigned or merely developer-signed, and the full stream once notarized and stapled. No dialog, no log line, nothing. For a product whose entire job is receiving sensor traffic, notarization isn't a distribution nicety; it's the difference between working and mysteriously dead.
Priced, and then held
Vigil went on sale this week at $25 a month for the software, with hardware nodes as inexpensive one-time purchases, on its own new domain — a consumer security product deserves its own front door, not a page inside a developer-tools site.
And then I froze shipping on it. After using the builds hard, my verdict was that the experience wasn't at the bar yet, and I put a hard hold in the ship pipeline — no agent or session can push a Vigil build until I lift it. Selling access to something I'm not proud of yet is how trust dies. The sensing works; the product around it needs to earn the release.
That tension — real breakthrough underneath, unfinished product on top — is the most honest description of Vigil today. The breakthrough is the hard part, and it's done. The rest is work.