Lessons from wiring a hardware demo for real users

Prototype demos lie a little. They work on the desk, with the good cable, when the person who built it is standing there. The first time we put a sensor setup in front of real users, the hard parts were power, labeling, heat, and explaining what the lights meant. The code was not even the main problem that day. After that I stopped treating enclosure, logs, and reset behavior as cleanup tasks. Fo…