Fireside is the wall-mounted touchscreen that gives you thermostat, lighting, and energy controls without reaching for your phone. This week it stopped pretending to be a CAN node and became what it actually is: a fast, latency-friendly MQTT remote.
The switch from wired CAN to WiFi plus MQTT took a week of cleanup. Old WiFi settings got ripped out. Brightness settings stopped losing themselves when the SD card was pulled. The clock now pulls from GNSS with a locale-aware offset, so a panel in California shows California time without a manual setting. Thermostat current temperature finally displays. Energy values populate from MQTT the moment the screen wakes up. Water tank levels are the next thing on the list.
Picket and Spotter get real
Picket, the cabinet and door sensor, moved from an idea to a working module. It now has firmware, a schematic, and the start of a CAD enclosure. The big call of the week was switching its microcontroller to a Waveshare ESP32-C6 Zero, mostly because the documentation is substantially better than the board we were originally sourcing.
Spotter, the tow-vehicle module, made the same MQTT switch as Fireside and got a documentation pass to explain the choice. Tow vehicles have their own radio stack separate from the trailer, so MQTT over WiFi is a better fit than trying to bridge CAN across a hitch.
Headwaters and Farwatch grow up
Stale data handling landed in both Headwaters and Farwatch. If a module stops talking, its values blank out instead of showing the last reading forever, which was exactly the kind of subtle bug that would bite you on a trip. Real-time deployment status now surfaces in Farwatch, so you can watch an OTA deploy from your phone and know when it finishes.
KiCAD library additions
The shared KiCAD library picked up a DIP switch (used across several modules for termination and device-ID config), footprints for the Waveshare ESP32-C6 Zero and the Pico, and the TrailCurrent logo and text as actual footprints you can drop onto a board's silkscreen. Small change, nice touch.