TrailCurrent is getting close to its first real release. The work has shifted from adding things to hunting down the last stubborn bugs, and we finally have a bench setup that can recreate the ones the road found. Here is where things stand.
We can finally recreate the road, indoors
Back in June we took the rig out for three days and came home with a list. The stubborn items on it were all Milepost, the wall-mounted display: a screen that would not wake up when the system was at its busiest, and a flicker on the busier screens. We shipped fixes for both, and we said at the time that we wanted another field run before calling them solved, because the bench could not produce the conditions that caused them.
That last part has changed. We built a bench setup that does.
Here is what was missing. Every TrailCurrent module talks to every other one over a single shared wire. Think of it as one long conversation running through your rig. With two or three modules connected, that conversation is quiet and everything behaves. With a full build it is a crowded room, and the screens have to keep up with all of it while also drawing a dashboard for you. A quiet bench with a couple of modules on it will never look like that, so the bugs simply do not appear.
The new setup puts a full, noisy system on the bench on purpose and leaves it running for hours. More importantly, every screen is on a cable to a computer the whole time, printing out what it is doing moment to moment. In the trailer, a display that misbehaves gives you nothing to work with. You see a bad screen and you guess. On the bench, we can make it happen on demand and then read back exactly what the software was doing in the seconds before it went wrong.
That turned a "wait for the next trip and hope it happens again" problem into a normal debugging problem. Things closed out since then:
- A screen that woke up confused. Asleep for a few hours, then back to a muddled display instead of a clean one.
- Taps that did not land. Touch on the wall display is more reliable now, including when the system is at its busiest.
- Alarms missing from the list. They fired correctly at the time, then never showed up in the notification list afterward.
- A silent buzzer. An alarm would go off on screen without making a sound.
- Clocks ignoring your time zone. The zone you picked in settings was not being applied everywhere it should have been.
- A settings switch that did nothing. It looked like it worked. It did not.
- Leveling readings not arriving. Numbers from the leveling module were not landing on the screen correctly.
The flicker is still open, and we would rather say so than round up. After many hours of continuous running, displays can start to flicker or show a torn image, as if the picture is being redrawn faster than the screen can keep up. Milepost looks fixed. It has gone twelve hours straight without a stumble, and it is going to run around the clock for a week before we call it good, because this is exactly the kind of bug that waits until hour twenty to show itself. Spotter is under load right now with its own latest round of fixes, and we do not have a verdict on it yet.
None of this is glamorous work. It is exactly the work that separates a fun weekend project from something you install in a rig and forget about, which is the bar 1.0 has to clear.
Peregrine, out at the fire
Peregrine is the voice assistant that runs on your rig instead of in somebody's data center. Ask it a question, get an answer, no internet required and nothing recorded off-site. Talking to it has never been the hard part. Talking to it from where you actually are was.
Peregrine listens through its own box, which lives inside the rig. That is fine when you are inside. It does nothing for you when you are set up in a chair outside, which is a fair share of the reason anyone owns one of these.
Fireside is the panel that comes with you. It runs on wifi and carries its own battery, so it works anywhere your rig's signal reaches, including out at the fire. It now has a talk button. Hold it, say what you want, let go. Fireside picks up your voice with its built-in microphone, sends it to Peregrine over your rig's wifi, and plays the answer back through its own speaker. Peregrine still does all the thinking. Fireside is the ears and the voice, wherever you happen to be sitting.
The talk button matters as much as the reach. Peregrine's usual way in is a wake word, which means a microphone listening for its name. Push to talk means the microphone is off until you press it. Outside, that is the difference between something that works and something that does not. Wind, a crackling fire, the neighbors two sites over, and a conversation of your own all give a wake word plenty of chances to mishear. Holding a button removes the guesswork, and it means nothing is picking up your campsite the rest of the evening.
We can do any of this because of the screen we picked. Fireside runs on the Waveshare ESP32-P4 WiFi 6 7-inch touchscreen, and it already has the parts this feature needs sitting on the board: a microphone good enough to pick you up across a picnic table, a real speaker amplifier so the answer comes back loud enough to hear outdoors, and a fast wifi radio to carry your voice there and the reply back without stuttering. On top of that it has the headroom to record you, send it, and play the answer while still drawing the dashboard behind the talk button. A cheaper panel would have meant bolting on a microphone, a speaker, and an amplifier as separate parts, and that is usually where a nice idea quietly dies. That link carries our affiliate tag, which costs you nothing and sends a small cut back to the project. If you would rather skip the tag, strip ?&aff_id=Trailcurrent off the URL.
Cameras, on your gateway
Camera support has landed on Headwaters. Plug a normal USB webcam into the little computer that runs your rig, name it in settings, and it shows up as a live tile in the app on your phone, tablet, or laptop. The video never leaves your rig and the cameras only stream while somebody is actually looking. We wrote that one up in full a few days ago, so rather than repeat it here: Eyes on Your Rig.
What has changed since is which camera we point people at. Any USB webcam still works, but most of them go effectively blind once the sun goes down, and after dark is exactly when you want to see what is going on around the rig. The one we are testing with now switches to night vision on its own as the light drops, so the view stays useful all night without you touching anything. It is this one on Amazon, and that is another affiliate link on the same terms as the one above. One is connected and running. A second is on order so we can confirm the two camera setup with these specifically.
One thing worth knowing before you order four of them. Every camera you are actively watching is more work for Headwaters, because it is the thing turning camera video into something your phone can display. Two is comfortable on a standard build. If you are picturing more than that, step up to a Compute Module with more memory when you buy. It is a cheap decision at order time and an annoying one to redo later, since the module is not something you swap in an afternoon.
Every screen starting to look like the same product
TrailCurrent gives you several places to see what your rig is doing. The app on your phone. Spotter in the tow vehicle. Milepost on the wall. Fireside wherever you set it down. Up to now, each of those grew up on its own schedule, and they looked like it. Same information, four slightly different personalities.
Fireside and Milepost have both had a visual pass to bring them in line with Spotter and the phone app. Same color treatment, same layout habits, same way of showing a number, same place to find the alarms. Nothing about what they do changed. What changed is that walking from the truck to the trailer no longer feels like switching products.
The last hour, at a glance
A single number tells you where things are right now. It does not tell you where things are going. Your battery reading of 71 percent means something very different if it was 68 percent an hour ago than if it was 94 percent an hour ago.
Fireside now keeps a rolling hour of history and draws it as a small graph next to the number. Nine measurements are tracked: solar production, battery charge, voltage, power draw, temperature, humidity, carbon dioxide, air quality, and carbon monoxide. Each graph steps forward every two and a half minutes, so you get the last sixty minutes at a glance without having to stand there and watch it.
This is the kind of thing that makes an air quality reading actually useful. A carbon dioxide number that is high and climbing is a very different message than one that is high and dropping because you already opened a window.
Cornerstone is on the bench
We wrote about Cornerstone a couple of weeks back as an idea. It is now a real project with real firmware, and it is in testing.
The idea has not changed. Instead of buying, flashing, and mounting a separate small box for every capability, Cornerstone is one board that does several jobs at once. What is running today combines five modules:
- Switchback, for switching and dimming eight circuits
- Picket, for eight cabinet, door, or hatch sensors
- Borealis, for air quality and safety sensing
- Bearing, for location
- Plateau, for level readings at the campsite
That is a different list than the one we published two weeks ago, and the reason is simple. The earlier plan had solar and shunt monitoring in the mix. Both need their own dedicated connection back to their sensors, the board does not have enough of them on its own, and the add-on part that would supply the extras is still pre-release. We are not going to build a module around a part you cannot reliably buy yet. Leveling needed a connection the board already had, so it went in instead. Solar and battery monitoring stay as their own modules until that part is properly available.
Cornerstone does not replace anything. If you would rather build with separate boxes in separate places, every one of those modules is still its own project with its own case and its own instructions. Cornerstone is the shorter path for a first build: fewer parts to source, one thing to flash, one box to mount.
Its detail page goes up once the 3D models for the case are finished.
Fireside's case is nearly done
Fireside moved to a larger seven inch screen recently, which meant starting the enclosure over. That design is in its final phases now, including a back plate that gives it a tidy mounting surface. When it is done, Fireside's detail page gets the same treatment every other module page has: renders, printable files, drawings with real dimensions, and an assembly walkthrough.
What 1.0 actually means
Not "we ran out of ideas." It means a build you can follow start to finish, hardware and firmware that hold up on a loaded system for days rather than minutes, screens that agree with each other, and instructions good enough that you do not need us in the loop.
The remaining list is short and mostly unglamorous. Finish the flicker. Finish the cases. Finish the pages. We will post as each piece lands, and the newsletter form below is the easiest way to catch them.