A long stretch of work aimed at one idea — that everything Palpable tells you about your hardware should be true, and everything it does to your hardware should survive a bad day.
Your boards now tell the truth about themselves. Every reading that reaches you carries a chain of evidence — where it came from, how it travelled, and how long ago it was real. A value is only as live as the thing that produced it, so if the container is fine but the sensor bus went quiet three minutes ago, you see that, rather than a confident-looking number that stopped meaning anything a while back. We gave freshness three named thresholds instead of a vague sense of "recent", added a validity dimension so a reading can be fresh, reachable and still meaningless, and made sure provenance travels all the way from the device to PAL. When a board can't reach its hardware, the app now says so in plain language you can act on — not a status light that quietly lies. And a wedged sensor tries to heal itself, up to two dozen times, and tells you it's doing it.
Alongside that, Raspberry Pi 5 is now a supported board. The SD-card installer is driven by whichever board you're actually holding rather than assuming the smallest one, image validation no longer bakes in one board's shape, and the download page serves the right assets for the hardware you picked. Getting a new device online got friendlier too: the Add Device flow is animated and streams its download as it goes, ESP boards handle cloud activation and time sync on their own, and the redesigned casing generations have landed on current builds. Certification picked up signal-margin checks, sustained heartbeat testing and tiered runs, so we can say a board works with more precision than "it booted".
Updates stopped being fragile. An interrupted OS download now resumes instead of starting over, which means a board on a patchy link can finally finish what it started. Delta patches — which we'd been publishing for a while without applying — now actually shrink what your board has to fetch. A board with no route to the cloud can be updated from a machine that does have one. And an update will never interrupt a script that's mid-run. Fleet-wide OS rollouts can now be evaluated end to end, though the rollout valve stays closed while we watch it behave.
PAL got considerably harder to trip up. Structured chat widgets replaced walls of text with cards you can read at a glance — including a clear "what's plugged in" view that correctly treats an actuator as an actuator, not a fault. Conversations keep their history and narrate what PAL is doing while it works, with voice output synced word by word. Behind the scenes, we narrowed the space in which PAL can be wrong: sensor reads are now shaped so they're difficult to get wrong rather than merely rejected afterwards, PAL knows the difference between a continuous reading and an event, it knows how old its hardware facts are, and generated scripts follow product-taste rules with a recovery path when things go idle. PAL can also answer "where is my order" now. We tested a heavier generation pack by name, measured it honestly, and left it switched off — it wasn't better.
A handful of smaller things round it out. Pending organisation invites have a one-tap Remind button. Notifications run through a single send path with the triggers that were previously only promised. Conrad, Reichelt, TME, RS and Farnell are registered as distributors, so sourcing parts in the EU and UK is far less of a scavenger hunt. Every pressable element in the app now looks pressable, not just the chat widgets. Behind the curtain, we tightened our own guardrails — validation that rejects unpublished capability names and unused script parameters, build checks that catch unhandled async work and mismatched data identifiers before they ship, type-checking on the fleet manager, a flashing toolchain upgrade that stops it rewriting image headers, seven previously ignored device broadcasts now wired into the client, and timing data added to write-intent traces. None of that is visible on screen; all of it is why the visible parts hold up.
A lot of this work is the kind you only notice when something doesn't go wrong. That's rather the point — and there's more coming as Pi 5 boards land in more hands.