Alcove a Craftpine practice
Unattended retail · A Craftpine practice

Feasibility studies for unattended retail.

The practice's checkout unit on the bench: a single-board computer driving a small touchscreen showing a tap-to-order menu
The practice’s own checkout unit on the bench, July 2026: a single-board computer behind a small touchscreen, running the live order grid. Photo: the practice.

Alcove was formed in 2026, within Craftpine, to research and develop unattended retail: small-format stores that run themselves.

A study tests the site, the format, the machine, and the numbers. It ends in one of three verdicts: go, pivot, or kill. Method →

An NVIDIA Jetson-class edge module on a workbench, the NVIDIA wordmark clear on the heatsinkClose-up of the NVIDIA-branded edge computer beside its board, the NVIDIA wordmark legible
The practice builds what it studies. The edge stack behind Project 01’s unattended store: an NVIDIA Jetson-class box running the language and speech models on-device, voice in about 2.6 seconds, with the cloud kept as the ledger of record. The platform →

The platform

The working stack the practice keeps: four money paths proved to destruction, the checkout unit above, and an on-device AI validation on a $250-class edge computer.

The platform · proved July 2026The working platform

Payments, inventory, an unattended checkout unit, and on-device voice AI, kept whole after the venue closed. The production deployment is parked and restores from a dashboard; the record, the pathway from one unit to hundreds, and the CA$79 part that closes the gap to a real till are all here.

Proved · parked4 money paths71-check destruction pass1 live dollar provedSee the platform

Projects

Aerial view of the 520 Barton corner at its signalized intersectionProject 01 · Published July 2026520 Barton

Feasibility of unattended, machine-served retail on a signalized Hamilton corner. Nine chapters, four appendices, every load-bearing claim traced to a primary source.

Verdict: kill8 concepts tested~$0 venue capital spentRead the study

The record

The program behind Project 01, accounted for in one place: what was built, what killed it, and what survives.

Corner · April 30 to July 14, 2026The Corner record

A payments platform for unattended retail, built in 76 days and proved with a live dollar on real rails, then closed on the category’s own published evidence. Including what was never proved.

Verdict: kill76 days · 173 commits1 live dollar, refundedRead the record