(Featuring the "Meow Turtle" Reference Implementation)
Ninelives is an industrial-grade, fault-tolerant SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) middleware built for Constructors.
Traditional open-source SCADA projects (like FUXA, PyScada, or Scada-LTS) assume you are an Integrator—someone who already dropped $10,000 on proprietary Siemens or Allen-Bradley PLCs and just needs a pretty web dashboard. They rely on heavy Ethernet protocols like OPC-UA or standard Modbus, and often require Windows Servers and extensive IT budget approvals.
Ninelives bridges the web directly to bare copper. It is a full-stack framework designed to let you build distributed, highly deterministic physical automation networks using $4 microcontrollers (Raspberry Pi Picos) and a central Linux brain (Raspberry Pi 5), entirely bypassing enterprise IT friction.
If ROS (Robot Operating System) is a massive, multi-lane highway for gigabytes of LIDAR and 4K video, Ninelives is a hyper-fast, low-latency bullet train for physical hardware execution.
Ninelives trades high bandwidth for extreme, deterministic reliability over bare-metal serial connections.
- The Bandwidth Limit: The system runs over RS-485 at 115,200 baud, giving a maximum theoretical throughput of ~11.5 Kilobytes per second. This is strictly for telemetry, state synchronization, and hardware commands. Heavy compute (like AI vision) must remain on the host RP5.
- The Node Topology: A single RP5 "Brain" can comfortably manage an RS-485 bus of 4 to 8 Pico "Limbs".
- The Component Density: Each Pico can reliably manage roughly 10 physical hardware abstractions (e.g., 2 I2C sensors, 4 pneumatic solenoids, 2 PWM vibratory motors, 2 digital limit switches) at microsecond precision.
- Horizontal Scaling: Need 100 actuators? You don't overload the bus. You simply add a second RP5 Brain to the network, commanding its own dedicated RS-485 fleet of Picos.
The framework abandons traditional reactive control loops. Instead, it operates on a "Split-Brain" philosophy:
- The Passive Digital Twin (Host): The RP5 Logic Engine never queries the hardware directly. It operates entirely against a real-time, memory-resident object model (the Digital Twin) that passively ingests telemetry and mirrors the physical reality of the factory floor.
- The MTIP Protocol (Transport): Communication utilizes the custom Message Transfer Interface Protocol (MTIP). It features payload deduplication, CRC-16 checksums, and prioritized queueing. Critical safety alarms (0x48) bypass standard command queues to guarantee sub-second system-wide Emergency Stops.
- "Humble" Firmware (The Limbs): The Pico firmware (
app.py) is completely generalized. It has zero business logic. It reads aconfig.jsonfile, turns pins HIGH/LOW, applies EMA (Exponential Moving Average) filters to sensor noise, and manages physical soft-starts to prevent electrical brownouts. - Industrial Hardening: The framework features Phase-Locked Garbage Collection to prevent motor stutters, atomic OTA (Over-The-Air) flash updates with automatic rollback on boot failure, and a "Closed-Loop Verification" system that uses fuzzy logic (Confidence Decay) to demand physical sensor proof for every actuator state change.
To stress-test the Ninelives framework, this repository includes the codebase for Meow Turtle: a high-speed, high-precision robotic sorting machine for singulating and cataloging small Lego parts.
Instead of writing a monolith, the sorting logic is built entirely on top of the generic Ninelives API.
core0 - Commander/: The "Self-Aware" System Coordinator. Runs the asyncio Python logic loop, maintains the Digital Twin, and serves the NiceGUI browser-based control panel.core1 - Surveyor/: The Vision Process node. Analyzes images, identifies parts, and pushes high-bandwidth AI results to the internal Synapse Bus (completely isolated from the RS-485 hardware bus).core3 - Librarian/: The Database Process node. Manages inventory databases, kit lists, and order fulfillment tracking.
Because Ninelives relies on a generalized hardware layer, these nodes run identical app.py firmware. Their roles are defined entirely by their local config.json:
pico1/ (The Loader): Manages bulk material handling. Controls tipper motors and vibrating shakers to normalize the input flow of pieces.pico2/ (The Gatekeeper): Handles high-precision sensing. Uses PIO state machines and TSL2591 light sensors as high-speed beam breaks to assign "Spatial Birth Certificates" (exact global pulse counts) to incoming parts.pico3/ (The Distributor): Executes precision sorting. Controls the main BLDC conveyor motor and fires specific functional air solenoids (Bins 1-10).pico_template/: The base firmware environment for any new limb on the network.
To achieve industrial sorting precision, Meow Turtle does not use standard wall-clock time, which is vulnerable to belt friction and mechanical load variations. Instead, it utilizes Ninelives' PIO pulse-counting abstractions. By tracking physical motor tachometer pulses, sorting decisions are made strictly based on physical distance traveled (mm_per_pulse), rendering the entire system completely speed-invariant.