Today we published the first full build guide for a TrailCurrent module. Headwaters now has a detail page with every part, every dimension, every print setting, and every assembly step in one place.
What's on the page
The Headwaters detail page covers the whole build from a pile of parts to a running edge gateway. A bill of materials with direct links to the Waveshare components. Dimensioned orthographic drawings pulled straight from the CAD. The 3D printed case files, both as raw STL and as a ready-to-slice Bambu Studio project with the full ABS profile baked in. A step-by-step assembly walkthrough. Studio renders of the assembled case and the individual printed parts so you know what you're aiming at before you hit print.
Nothing on the page is guesswork. The dimensions came out of the FreeCAD bounding boxes. The print parameters came out of the .3mf project we actually use ourselves. The parts list matches what's in the assembly file. If anything on the page is wrong, the CAD file is wrong too, and we'd want to know.
Heads up: the Waveshare links in the bill of materials are affiliate links. They cost you nothing extra, and a small cut comes back to the project to help keep this kind of documentation coming. If you'd rather skip the affiliate tag, just strip ?aff_id=Trailcurrent off the URL.
Why we did this
Open source only really means something if you can actually build the thing yourself. Source code is half the story. A bill of materials, dimensioned drawings, a print profile, and a known-good assembly sequence are the other half. Up until today we had the first half covered; now we're starting on the second.
The goal is to shrink the gap between "I read about this" and "I'm holding one." Every hour a builder has to spend figuring out which Waveshare board we're using, or which screws fit the case, or what layer height prints the logo cleanly, is an hour that doesn't get spent on the part of the project that actually interests them. We already know the answers to those questions. Writing them down once is cheap; looking them up ten times is not.
This is just the start
Headwaters is the first module to get this treatment. Every other one is going to get the same. Torrent, Tapper, Bearing, Borealis, Ampline, Solstice, Picket, Aftline, Plateau, Therma, Milepost, Fireside, Spotter, Peregrine — all of them. Same format, same level of detail: exactly what to buy, exactly how to put it together, exactly which files to print and flash.
By the time we're done, anyone who wants to build a full TrailCurrent install will have a printable bill of materials for the whole vehicle. That's the goal. This post is just the first checkpoint along the way.
If you've been waiting for a reason to pull the trigger on a build, this is it. Start with Headwaters.