Why my reconnaissance UGV kept throwing OVERLOAD, and how a lookup-table palette, a frame-rate cap and an offscreen raster blit took the thermal stream and the SLAM map from a saturated CPU to a smooth ride.

The problems between the drawing board and a working vehicle: a browser-fed watchdog that flipped the OVERLOAD badge, a palette filter that ate nine cores, a camera that refused to follow orders, and a map that stalled the handheld.

How IGNIS-8 came to be: a swollen cell on a battery production floor, a phone call, and the idea of a remotely operated platform that could look at it from a safe distance.