Two days ago, Headwaters left the workbench. It is now mounted inside the trailer it was designed for, running on its own power, talking to every module on the bus, and being watched from a phone over a cellular link through Farwatch. It has not gone dark since.
Watching it live
This is a phone video, recorded from our actual Farwatch install, of the trailer reporting in. No staging, no mocks, no "imagine if this worked." This is what the live app looks like on a real rig running on real power.
The power budget that makes it boring
The goal of this install was not to run Headwaters for an hour. The goal was to run it indefinitely, on solar alone, without ever worrying about it. Here is what we have:
- 200 W of solar on the roof
- 100 Ah of battery capacity
- Headwaters running 24/7 on the CM5 build we wrote about last week
While it is monitoring the trailer, the whole system averages about 15 W of constant power draw. That is the number that makes everything else work. At 15 W, even a single 200 W panel has plenty of room to keep up on a modest winter day, and comfortable headroom on anything brighter.
Since the install, the battery has not dropped below 75% at its daily low point. That is true on sunny days, and it is true on cloudy days. The limiting factor on this install, it turns out, has not been the panels. It has been the sun. On the overcast days we have had so far, a single 200 W panel would have produced about the same amount of energy the whole array did, because the ceiling was set by how much light was available, not by how much panel we had to catch it. More panels do not manufacture more sun. They just mean you hit your daily budget a little earlier on the good days.
This matters because "offline-capable, edge-first" is only a real design goal if it can actually live somewhere without grid power. Until you put the system on solar and leave it there, you don't really know. Now we know: 15 W is the budget, 200 W of panels is more than enough to meet it, and a 100 Ah bank gives you the buffer to ride through the dim days without thinking about it.
What's being monitored
Farwatch is pulling live telemetry from Headwaters over the cloud bridge: system stats (CPU, memory, temperature), power readings from Ampline, SOC and voltage from the battery bank, and the status of every module on the CAN bus. If the trailer moves, we'll know. If a module stops responding, we'll know. If the battery starts dropping faster than it should, we'll know before it becomes a problem.
That last point is why this install exists. Not "monitoring for the sake of monitoring," but a feedback loop between the platform and the rig it lives in, so every future design decision has real-world numbers to argue with.
What comes next
Now that Headwaters is in the trailer and stable, the next wave of work is about living with it. We'll be looking at edge cases that only show up over days and weeks: temperature swings, long idle periods, cold starts after storage, intermittent cellular. Every quirk we find will land in a commit and, eventually, in one of these posts.
If you want to see the platform running in an actual rig, that is what you are looking at. It's quiet, it runs on sunlight, and it has been up for two days straight. Exactly as designed.