Operations

Page	Covers
Deployment	version policy, the firmware pipeline, and the hardware acceptance tests
On-device pipeline	the frame budget, the detection gate, why not an ESP32-S2, and what the web interface replaced
Documentation pipeline	the docs-only build, local preview, validation and automated GitHub Pages deployment
Handoff protocol	the rules any contributor — human or model — works under

Two build modes, independent by design

Normal build                        Docs-only build
└── ./plxy.sh build                 └── ./plxy.sh docs-build
    ESP-IDF, PowerShell, 16 MB          mkdocs-material and nothing else
    firmware, a board attached          seconds, no toolchain, no hardware

Neither triggers the other. A documentation change never queues behind a firmware build, and a firmware change never republishes the site unless it touched docs/. The GitHub Actions paths filters enforce the same split.

The record

Three files at the repository root are the running history, and they are maintained by hand rather than generated:

File	Is
PROJECT_STATE.md	what is true now, including what has been tried and failed
ROADMAP.md	what is planned
CHANGELOG.md	what changed, in order

Read them before major changes. The handoff protocol says the same thing in rule form.

Before a thesis experiment

docs/HARDWARE_SETUP.md §10 lists the measurements to record before the experiments start — board MAC, sensor part, measured fps, PSRAM free, the component versions in dependencies.lock. Numbers taken afterwards cannot be attributed to a configuration.