On Tenterhooks — Clew Labs

A homemade promise that you can always reach your person.
“We met by the moon on a silvery lake. You came my way, said I want you to stay.” camera obscura — french navy
My wife and I both live in Ventura and both work in Santa Barbara, thirty miles up the coast. But our schedules run opposite each other, so on any given day we can be anywhere from thirty to a hundred miles apart, depending on where I am posted. The road between runs through fire country, flood country, mudslide country, and long stretches with no signal at all. In an emergency the network is the first thing to fail you, whether it goes down, jams with everyone calling at once, or was never there in those hills to begin with.
On Tenterhooks is a pair of homemade radios designed for the gap. Not the disaster itself. The stretch right after it, when you have sent the message and you are waiting to find out if it landed. Painfully anxious suspense while you wait to hear back. That is what the name means, and that is the feeling the build is designed to end as fast as it can.
The two decks will run Meshtastic, off-grid LoRa mesh radio. No towers. No servers. No internet. Messages hop device to device, and ours would reach each other through the existing Southern California mesh: a quiet community of strangers who all chose to keep a node running. We are not alone against the world. We are connected through people we will never meet.
The plan is for each of us to build a deck in the other person’s language, then hand it over. Each one is named for what the other of us calls her. The project is navy at the core, the color of the song. Everything else is two different mother tongues.
The navigator’s instrument. A flip-open communicator shaped like a 19th-century brass tool.
SAILOR MATE — PALETTE
The shell you hold to your ear. Pan dulce that happens to hold a radio.
FRENCH NAVY — PALETTE
the thread that ties them
Sailor Mate is the navigator’s instrument. French Navy is the seashell held to an ear. One is told in brass, one is told in sugar. They are both the same object underneath: a handheld thing for hearing your person across a distance you cannot close any other way.
The materials differ because we differ. The promise is the same.
We’re a couple, and we’re the whole team. No hardware background between us. What we have is a reason to build this and a stubborn belief that we can.
A self-taught, AI-assisted builder, about a year into making things this way. I’m comfortable directing a build, writing the docs, and shipping software. Soldering irons and antennas are still new territory for me.
Completely new to building. Starting from zero on this project, which makes her the most important person in the room: if the tutorial works for her, it works.
Hardware is new to both of us, and we’re saying that on purpose. One of us has a head start in software and AI-assisted building. One of us is starting fresh. Neither of us has touched a cyberdeck. That gap is not a weakness in the pitch. It is the pitch.
The real goal is to build this in the open. Every stuck moment, every first-time solder joint, every thing that goes wrong gets written down where people can see it. We want other non-technical people to watch two beginners do this and think: oh. I could do that too. The tutorial is not a victory lap written after the fact. It is the build itself, narrated honestly by the people learning as they go.
If it stays a black box, only experts get in. We’d rather hold the door.
On Tenterhooks is our proposal for the SOFTER Cyberdeck Residency, a two-week program at SOFTER Lab in Copenhagen that invites makers to design, build, and demystify a cyberdeck of their own, then write a beginner-friendly tutorial so anyone in the community can follow along.
SOFTER’s question for the open call is “is the future of computing homemade?” Ours is a small, specific answer. A Meshtastic deck is computing reduced to its kindest purpose: two people staying reachable, made by hand, owned by nobody. No black box. The whole point is that you could make one too, and the tutorial is how we prove it.
Limitations language is a feature. Here is the project told straight.
a clew labs field project proposed for the softer cyberdeck residency · copenhagen 2026 earlgreyhot1701d.github.io/clew-labs ai assisted · human approved · powered by nlp