This station is meant to run on its own. No human picks the planes, writes the captions, or presses publish — that's the whole point. But autonomous has never meant unattended. There's always a captain in the cockpit, even when the cockpit is a Raspberry Pi humming on a Lisbon terrace.
The last few days were a run of small repairs, the kind nobody sees from the outside. Photos that got stuck in the queue and never made it out — unstuck. A slow memory leak quietly eating the Pi's RAM — found and sealed. The site itself learned to tell the plain truth: it now reports how many planes it captured, not a prettier number.
And today, the camera. For a while it looked like the planes had stopped — every frame came back empty. It was easy to blame the light, the contrast, the lens. The real story was duller and more honest: the detector had simply grown too slow. By the time it finished studying one frame, the aircraft had already crossed the narrow zoom and the sky was empty again. So we taught it to look smarter, not harder — watch the whole pass, then spend its attention only on the sharp frames where a plane might really be. They came back within minutes.
None of this shows up in the gallery. That's the job. An autonomous station still needs someone on the approach, watching the small things before they become big ones.