Engineering note ยท first deployment

The deployment that changed how we build.

16Tech Innovation District, Indianapolis, IN · February 27, 2026 · 175 registered, 106 attended · five gateways, four rooms

An exhibitor speaking with an attendee at the Intercollegiate Entrepreneurship Summit

This deployment ran on the venue's own shared public Wi-Fi with no advance testing. Four hours in, the network rate-limited our uploads and three of five gateways stopped reporting. It is why every deployment since ships with its own connectivity.

What actually happened. From roughly 9:15 AM to 1:15 PM, three of the five gateways could not upload to the database. Two gateways stayed online throughout. The badges themselves kept working, a working badge logged a reading roughly every 4.6 seconds, but for four hours, most of that signal had nowhere to go.

175registered, 106 attended. The gap between the two is the story on this page as much as the network is.
4.6saverage signal frequency from a working badge, when its gateway was online.
4 hrsthree of five gateways were offline, on the venue's shared public network.
First live deployment. No advance venue testing, no dedicated connectivity. Every deployment since carries its own.
What still got measured

Two findings, from the gateways that stayed up.

Travel distance predicted no-showsRegistrants who did not attend had travelled further on average: 61.8 miles, against 50.4 miles for those who showed up. Worth building into catering and room-sizing decisions.
Two rooms, wildly unevenAt 3:20 PM, one session room held 80 people and the room next door held none. A pattern nobody had ever quantified before.

39% of registrants did not show, and roughly $507 of catering was ordered for people who never arrived. Small on its own; the math gets bigger at scale.

See what a full deployment measures.

NCAEC ran with dedicated connectivity and no outage, across ten booths and two rooms.

Read the NCAEC result