Engineering Blog

ElkScale Engineering Blog

Insights from the team. Mostly Gary.

Recent Posts

Engineering

We migrated our gate scanner to Raspberry Pi 4: a post-mortem

In Q4 2025 we made the decision to upgrade our perimeter access control unit from a Raspberry Pi 3B+ to a Raspberry Pi 4 (8GB). This post documents the migration, what went wrong, what went right, and why Gary should not be allowed to run firmware updates unsupervised.

Product

Introducing Antler-Class Tiering: how we formalised our node taxonomy

For years, ElkScale described its organic nodes simply as "the elk." Following customer feedback that this lacked precision, we are proud to introduce our formal Antler-Class tiering system, ranging from 2-point Starter nodes all the way to the 12-point Enterprise configuration. (Gerald.)

Infrastructure

Why we chose a Google Sheet over a real database (and why we stand by this)

Our analytics infrastructure runs on a single Google Sheet, manually updated by Gary every Friday afternoon. This post is a response to the seventeen customer emails asking us to "expose this via an API." The answer is no. The reasons are Gary's.

Culture

Eleven years on: what managing elk has taught me about distributed systems

I've been asked to write a "thought leadership" piece by Callum. I don't know what that means. Here is what I know: elk do not follow instructions, they have variable uptime, and the one you trust most (Brenda) will occasionally eat your paperwork. I am told this maps onto microservices architecture somehow.

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