There is a new tab in Overlook called Live Monitoring. Plug a USB webcam into your Headwaters, flip it on in settings, and it shows up as a live tile on any phone, tablet, or laptop that is on your rig's wifi. Two cameras verified, more supported, and none of it goes out to the internet.
A tab at the top of your screen
Overlook has been quietly growing into the one screen that shows what your rig is doing. Battery, solar, air quality, tanks, maps, cabinet alarms. Cameras were the obvious next thing, and now they are in.
Open Overlook, tap Live Monitoring, and you land on a grid. Every camera you have added and turned on shows up as its own live tile with a red LIVE badge and the name you gave it. Tap the tile to fill the screen with just that one view. Tap back and you are on the grid again.
If nothing is set up yet the page tells you exactly what to do, in plain language, with a button that jumps you straight to the settings page for cameras.
Any USB webcam you already have
The cameras are plain USB webcams. The kind of thing you can pick up at any store, or the one already in a drawer from a long-ago video call. If it works on a laptop, it will work here. The two in the screenshots are Logitech C920s. Any similar off-the-shelf webcam works the same way.
Plug one into a USB port on your Headwaters and it shows up in Settings under Cameras and Monitoring. Give it a friendly name like Front Entrance, Cargo Area, or Awning. Turn it on. It is now on the grid. Unplug it and the row goes gray so you know it is offline. Plug it back in and it comes right back.
Two cameras have been fully tested end to end. There is no hard cap in the software beyond what the little computer in your rig can keep up with, so a couple more is fair game.
Only running when you are looking
A camera that is streaming all day, whether anyone is watching or not, chews through power and heats up the computer. That is not how this is built. The video pipeline only starts when someone opens the Live Monitoring tab or the full-screen view. The moment you leave, or lock your phone, or close the browser, the streams stop. A short grace period keeps things smooth if you flip between tabs, then everything goes quiet again.
Idle cost is zero. Battery on your device and current draw on the rig both stay low unless you are actively looking. That was the point of the second round of work on this feature. The first pass got the picture on the screen. The second pass made sure the whole thing goes back to sleep when you are done.
Everything else keeps running
Cameras are not a mode you switch into. They live in the same app as everything else. Watching the driveway from the couch does not stop the fridge from being monitored or the battery from being logged. If a cabinet sensor trips while you are watching a tile, the alarm still fires. If a trip has GPS running for a log, it keeps running.
That is the whole point of putting everything in one place. You do not have a camera app, a battery app, and a map app fighting for space on your home screen. You have Overlook. Cameras are one tab in it. Battery is another. Map is another. Same rig, same app, same login.
On your rig, not somebody else's server
None of this video leaves your rig. There is no cloud recording service you have to pay for, no company on the other end watching frames of your driveway, no account you have to create. The camera plugs into the computer in your rig. The video is served from that same computer. Your phone or laptop pulls it directly over your rig's wifi. That is the entire path.
If your rig has no internet, the cameras still work. If you are in a canyon with zero bars, the cameras still work. If the router at home is off, the cameras still work when you are near the rig. The only thing you need is to be on the same wifi as the Headwaters. Every screen on the rig already is.
What is next
This is the first release of the feature. It works, it is on-demand, and it stays out of the way when you are not using it. From here the natural next steps are letting you place a camera tile onto other Overlook screens as a small watch-window, alerting on the camera the way we already alert on cabinets and air quality, and quick snapshots you can pull down for later. Recording to the Headwaters drive is on the list as well.
For today, though, you can plug in a couple of webcams, name them, and see what is going on around your rig from anywhere it can reach. That is a real capability that was not there yesterday.
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