How we keep story beats and device actuators in sync over BLE

Connected narrative hardware is easy to demo on the happy path. The interesting cases are mid-scene disconnect and what you put on the wire.

Event bus, not amplitude

We treat the story engine as a publisher of discrete events (beat reached, route chosen, voice line completed). Firmware maps each event to an actuation profile with start/shape/end. That avoids chasing a 20ms audio analysis loop across BLE jitter.

Mid-scene dropout defaults

1. Link lost → actuator idle (never hold last intensity)
2. Story clock holds at a beat boundary
3. Reconnect does not auto-resume physical output; the scene asks again
4. Telemetry stays counters, not a session transcript

Why this belongs on DEV

This is a protocol/product-safety writeup for makers wiring interactive fiction to peripherals. Product context: Crevia Tech / CRAVE AI (18+ hardware; this post is about the failure path).