A wide, very dark panoramic render of a synthetic arena with pillars and a checkered floor, overlaid with red, cyan and amber contact brackets, a compass ribbon along the top and a circular minimap at the bottom left

Personal systems projectSoloDrawing 15 of 47

Argus

Argus is a helmet I'm building for airsoft. It's supposed to show you people through walls by stitching together what it gets from cameras, a thermal camera, and whatever your teammates and the robot dog spot. So far it's about 129,000 lines of C++, and none of it has been hooked up to a real sensor yet.

StatusIn development, 2026
WrittenAbout 129,000 lines of hand-written C++17 across 15 subsystems
Desktop tests105 run, 105 pass, on a laptop with no sensor attached
Not run on hardwareZero lines. Every performance figure below is a budget
OwnedThe helmet display. Everything else is still unbought
TargetJetson Orin Nano 8GB worn on the body, Raspberry Pi 5 on the robot

Sheet 02 of 09/System

The name and the idea

Argus is named after the hundred eyed giant who kept some eyes open while the rest slept, and the project is built on the same idea. It has a bunch of independent ways of noticing a person, and they all have to agree on one picture, on the same clock, in the same frame budget.

The same panoramic arena render with a tall cross hatched amber wedge covering the sector one camera used to see, and a small status readout reading CAM 5 of 6 — *PL 03*Camera two, killed mid run. The stitch marks the dead sector with a hatched amber wedge instead of interpolating over it. The status readout drops from CAM 6/6 to CAM 5/6.

An occupancy grid render on a near black background, with white walls, dark blue grey floor regions and a thick magenta shape running across the middle — *PL 05*The same grid without the fog. Magenta is everything the map has decided is moving. It won't freeze any of that into a wall, no matter how solid it looks right now.

Sheet 03 of 09/Parts

Issued as separate drawings

I split this project into parts. Each part below has its own page, with its own sections and pictures.

Part 01 / 03
Video pipeline
How video gets from the cameras to the display. It covers the exposure solve, the stitch, late reprojection, and the forty five milliseconds all of it has to fit inside.
3 sections →
Part 02 / 03
Finding people
Four ways to find a person through a wall, tracking where the gun is pointing in the dark, and a map that doesn't turn a person standing still into a wall.
3 sections →
Part 03 / 03
Runtime and safety
How the nine processes share data, with one writer for each piece of it. It also covers the twenty four calibrations and the safety document, which overrides every other tradeoff.
3 sections →

Sheet 04 of 09/Status

Where it stands

I track the gap between what's written and what's been verified on hardware. Right now the verified column is completely empty.

Sheet 05 of 09/Order

Why the software comes first

I'm writing all the software before I buy any of the real hardware. The hardware is the expensive part, and I want to prove the architecture works before I spend the money.

Sheet 06 of 09/Simulator

Synthetic test harnesses

Every subsystem gets a synthetic test harness that's built to be visibly wrong when the code is wrong, because a stub that just returns something plausible tells you nothing.

Sheet 07 of 09/Hardware

What it costs and what I own

A full rig, including the thermal core, comes to about $4,800 to $6,100. So far the only thing I've bought is the helmet display.

Sheet 08 of 09/What next

What's next

The next step is boring. I'll buy the first real parts and find out how much of this holds up on real hardware, and I expect some of it to be wrong.

Sheet 09 of 09/Source

Inspect the work

↗Gray, the quadruped