Headwaters now has a second build recipe, and it is the easiest one yet. Same brain, same software, same feature list. Fewer parts. No 3D print. No add-on hat. No custom wiring connector. If you have been eyeing a Headwaters build and the case, the cable, and the little brown Deutsch plug looked like more than you signed up for, this one is for you.
What changed
The original Headwaters build sits a Compute Module 5 on a Waveshare CM5 base board, stacks a CAN hat on top, wires a small Deutsch connector into the case wall for the vehicle CAN feed, and drops the whole thing into a 3D-printed enclosure that we shipped as an STL. It works. It has been working. It is also more assembly than it needs to be.
The new option is a single carrier board that folds most of that into itself: the Waveshare CM5-IO-Wireless-Base. CAN is on the board. Power in from your rig's 12 V or 24 V system is on the board, straight to a screw terminal. The NVMe slot is on the board. And Waveshare sells a matching rail-mount ABS case for it. One order, one carrier, one enclosure. Done.
You can grab the carrier here: Waveshare CM5-IO-Wireless-Base. That link sends a small cut back to the project and costs you nothing extra.
What that saves you
Three things, all of which people have written us about.
No 3D print. The Waveshare case is a finished plastic enclosure that snaps onto a DIN rail or mounts with screws. If you do not own a printer, do not have space for one, or just do not want to spend an evening babysitting a print bed, that is the whole story: buy the case with the board.
No little Deutsch plug and no screws for the CAN cable. Vehicle CAN wires straight into a screw terminal on the carrier. Two conductors, tighten them down, done. That was the fiddliest step in the original build and it is gone.
No separate CAN hat. One less part to source, one less part to seat, one less thing to line up over the M.2 slot. The onboard CAN is isolated at the board level, so the vehicle bus and the compute side stay electrically separate, which is what we wanted from the hat in the first place.
Assembly gets shorter by a lot. The hardware section of the build now looks more like "install the NVMe, drop the module into the case, wire in power and CAN, close it up."
What it might do later
The wireless-base carrier also carries slots we are not using today: an M.2 B-Key slot and a mini-PCIe slot that between them will take 4G, 5G, and LoRa radios. We are not committing to anything yet. But once the compute board has those slots on it, two doors open that were closed before.
One is Headwaters running its own cell modem. Today the recommended setup is a Spitz Plus router alongside Headwaters for the cellular link. With the wireless base, the modem could live on the same board as the brain, and the router becomes optional for a subset of builds.
The other is a LoRa radio on Headwaters that talks to long-range sensors across your property or campground. Storage lot with no WiFi, land you bought that is not built out yet, boat on a mooring ball with a sensor on the dock. That is a real class of use case, and now the hardware is in position to serve it.
Both of those are ideas at this stage, not shipping features. We are noting them because the door is now open, not because we have walked through it.
The other build is still here
The original CM5 base plus CAN hat plus 3D-printed enclosure is not going anywhere. If you already built one, keep running it. If you prefer the printed case for cosmetic reasons or because you want the CAN feed on the Deutsch connector to match the rest of your build, that path is fully supported and will keep getting the same software as the new one. Same image, same features, same updates.
Every other module in the system is unchanged too. Bearing, Solstice, Picket, Switchback, Milepost, Fireside, Spotter. All of them see the same Headwaters on the CAN bus regardless of which carrier board you picked.
Why we did this
The pattern from the last few months is easy to name. Every time a piece of the build can be replaced with something off the shelf that does the same job for less money and less assembly, we do it. Solstice absorbing Ampline. Switchback taking over from Torrent. And now this. Headwaters has always been the most involved module to build, and this variant takes the biggest chunks of that involvement off the table.
We hope the folks who have been curious about TrailCurrent but stopped at the case or the CAN wiring find this one easier to say yes to. The alternative build is still there for people who want it. Both stay open source, both stay documented, both stay yours.
The Headwaters page has the build details. The image, the CAD, the docs, and the flashing steps all live in the Headwaters repository.