What broke in the first Digital Pod, and what we changed

Digital Pods exist because a full makerspace isn't viable everywhere — limited space, unreliable power, a cluster of schools sharing one facility. The first unit we deployed handled the power problem the way it was designed to: a battery buffer smoothed out the drops and nobody noticed an outage during a session.

What we hadn't designed for was airborne dust from an unpaved access road, which found its way into the same enclosure vents that were sized for heat dissipation. Three months in, two of the six units were throttling under thermal load with clogged intakes, not because the electronics were wrong but because the enclosure assumed a cleaner environment than the site had.

Revision two moves the intake to a filtered, low-profile channel along the base rather than the top vents, and adds a filter that a site technician can swap without opening the case. It's a less elegant design on paper. It has not had a single thermal throttling incident since.

The lesson wasn't really about dust. It was that a spec written from a requirements document and a spec written after a site visit are different documents, and we now do the visit before the second revision of anything, not just the first.

The first deployment survived intermittent power. It did not survive the dust. Revision two is a different unit because of one site visit.