run_control() ran cycle() only when the meter value differed from the previous
poll. A meter that repeats a value therefore ran no control cycles at all -
while the heartbeat kept re-emitting the last command and the firmware kept
putting it on the wire every 2 s. Layer 1 stayed fed and every indicator read
healthy, so a command computed from an old reading went on being executed
through whatever the load did next. TEL-05 measured it: 70 s at a literally
constant 350.0 W, 14 arrivals, zero cycles.
cycle_floor_s (default 15 s) is a deadline on the GAP between cycles, reset by
every cycle whichever trigger fired - not a second scheduler. On a healthy meter
it never elapses, so the cycle rate and the commanded sequence are unchanged;
test_loop.py asserts that by driving the real loop twice on one binary (a huge
cycle_floor_s reproduces the old behaviour) and diffing the writes.
15 s is bracketed: above the ~11 s worst gap on a merely-unlucky healthy meter
(~5 s arrivals, 1 s detection, one dropped poll retried on the next tick), below
meter_max_age_s and the firmware's 30 s ingest veto, and equal to stale_input_s.
A floor cycle runs the full law. Freshness is already decided upstream - past
meter_max_age_s the reading is None, which is a P_SAFETY 0 W claim - and the
integrator advances per cycle, not per second, so bounding the gap bounds the
accumulation.
Not a freeze detector: nothing here decides whether a repeated reading is true.
DOCS.md's "accepted deviation" passage is qualified rather than deleted - the
window is now bounded at 3 x cycle_floor_s instead of open-ended, and its
"nothing accumulates while it is stalled" argument is called out as having
covered windup and not staleness. Same correction in control.py's comment.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Du77usMj8XNKNFZGmUiWDa
