The repos have been quiet for a few weeks. The shop has not been. There is a new video up, a machine coming together that is going to rebuild the cabinets in the trailer that started this whole project, early hardware on the bench for cameras that recognize what they are looking at, a Milepost that has settled into the wall and behaves, and one stubborn heat problem standing between Cornerstone and its first real write-up.
The same screen that runs your wall panel, now running a CNC
The new video is a handheld controller for a CNC machine. Two analog thumbsticks, a touchscreen in the middle, and a case you hold in both hands like a game controller. You use it to walk the cutting head around the material by hand, set your starting corner, and start a job without standing at a laptop covered in sawdust.
Here is the part we keep grinning about. That screen is not a special CNC part. It is the exact same seven inch touchscreen that runs Fireside, the portable panel you carry out to the campfire to run your lights and check your batteries. Same board, same screen, same tools we use to draw every TrailCurrent interface. We added thumbsticks and pointed it at a different machine.
Back in June we published a tour of the free tools we use to build those screens, and this pendant was the demo project in it. Since then it grew from a demo into something we are actually going to use. The code is public and still a work in progress at trailcurrentoss/TrailCurrentFluidCNCPendant. The machine itself runs FluidNC, which is free and open source, same as everything else in our toolchain.
If you want to build something on this screen yourself, it is the Waveshare ESP32-P4 seven inch touch panel. 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.
Why a CNC matters to a vehicle project
Fair question. We are not getting into the machine tool business.
TrailCurrent started with a cargo trailer conversion. An empty box on wheels that we turned into something you can live in. Everything about this project traces back to that build, including the frustration that started it: the wiring, the switches, the sensors, and the total absence of anything you could see or control from your phone without paying somebody a monthly fee.
That trailer is still in progress, and the cabinetry is the next chunk of it. Cabinets in a trailer are unforgiving. Nothing is square, every panel is a slightly different shape, and every cut has to be right the first time because the material is not free. A CNC turns that from a weekend of careful sawing and swearing into a file and a machine that runs it.
So the pendant is not a detour. It is a tool being sharpened before the next stretch of the original project. And the loop it closes is a good one: the screen we designed to control a rig is now driving the machine that builds the rig.
Cameras that know what they are looking at
Last month we shipped live camera monitoring in Overlook. Plug USB webcams into your Headwaters, and every camera shows up as a live tile on your phone, tablet, or laptop. It works, and people are using it.
It also has an obvious ceiling. A camera that streams is a window. It shows you what is happening only if you happen to be looking at that moment. If something rolls past your rig at three in the morning while it sits in a storage lot, a window does nothing for you.
The next step is a camera that understands what it sees, and does it on your rig instead of in somebody's data center. We have started hardware testing on a small controller with a camera attached that runs object detection models directly on the board. No cloud service, no subscription, no video leaving your property to be analyzed by a company you have never met.
Object detection is what it sounds like. Instead of reporting that some pixels changed, the board reports what changed. A person. A vehicle. An animal. A branch moving in the wind. That distinction is the whole game, because it is the difference between an alert you trust and an alert you learn to ignore.
Paired with the monitoring already in Overlook, the near term goal is straightforward: let the camera decide what is worth keeping. Rather than recording everything forever or recording nothing at all, the system saves video when something it can name actually happens, and tells you which kind of thing it was.
Further out, the interesting work is teaching it situations rather than objects:
- Down the road. Recognizing the events that matter while you are actually driving, when nobody is watching a screen.
- In storage. Knowing the difference between a maintenance guy walking the row and somebody circling your rig for the third time this week.
- On the hitch. For anyone towing, a camera watching the coupler, the chains, and the connection, trained to notice when something is not the way it was when you left.
We want to be honest about where this sits. The hardware testing is starting now. The model training is the long part, and training a model to reliably recognize a hitch coming loose at highway speed is a serious project, not a weekend. None of this is a feature you can turn on today. We are telling you because the boards are on the bench and this is the direction, not because it is around the corner.
Milepost is in the wall and behaving
In the last build log we wrote about the bench setup we put together to recreate, indoors, the bugs that only showed up on the road. The worst of them lived on Milepost, the wall mounted display: a screen that would not wake up cleanly, taps that did not land, and a flicker that only appeared after many hours of continuous running.
Milepost has now been updated to that bench tested firmware and installed in the trailer, and it has been running beautifully. No flicker, no missed taps, no confused wake ups. That is exactly the outcome we were hoping for when we built the bench, and it is a good argument for the boring work. Reproduce the problem where you can watch it, fix it where you can watch it, then put it back in the rig.
Cornerstone and the heat problem
Cornerstone is our many in one module. Instead of buying, flashing, and mounting a separate small box for every capability, it is one board that does several jobs at once: switching and dimming your lights, watching your cabinets and doors, monitoring air quality and safety, tracking your location, and reading how level you are at the campsite. It is the shortest path into a first build.
The firmware is in testing. The case is what is holding us up, and the reason is heat.
Everything in a sealed plastic box gets warm, and the processor is the warmest thing in there. The temperature sensor is in the same box. So instead of telling you how warm your rig is, it tells you how warm the inside of the case is, which is a couple of degrees off and drifts with how hard the board is working. A thermostat that reads warm is worse than no thermostat at all, because you trust it and it quietly makes you uncomfortable.
The fix is a case design problem more than a firmware problem: getting airflow where it needs to be, and putting distance between the part making heat and the part measuring it. We are working through it now. Once the readings are honest, Cornerstone gets a full write-up and its own page with renders, printable files, and an assembly walkthrough, the same as every other module.
What a quiet stretch actually looks like
When the commit history slows down on an open source project, it usually reads as a project going cold. Sometimes it is. Here it means the work moved off the keyboard for a while. Cabinets, cases, airflow, a machine that has to be built before it can build anything else, and a camera board that needs to prove itself on a bench before anybody writes a line of feature code around it.
All of it lands back in the same place: a rig that tells you what it is doing, that you own outright, that does not need a signal or a subscription to work. We will post as each piece comes together. The newsletter form below is the easiest way to catch them, and the videos go up on the open source channel as we make them.