Overlook, the web app that ships with every Headwaters, was already the way you talked to your rig. It just did not always know what shape screen you were looking at it on. This release fixes that, adds a proper mode for driving days versus camping days, teaches Overlook where you actually are, and lets you set the units you want to see.
The same app, laid out for the screen you have
Open Overlook on a phone, and you get a bottom nav bar with the essentials and a More menu for the rest. Open it on a tablet in landscape and the sidebar shows up with every page in reach. Open it on a laptop or the in-cabin display and the layout stretches out, room to breathe, mode switcher and system pages both visible without a click.
None of the screens are different apps. It is one PWA, one code path, one deploy. The layout just knows what to do with the room it has.
The reason we cared enough to do this is that TrailCurrent lives on a mix of hardware by design. A phone in your pocket. A wall-mounted tablet in the galley. A laptop when you are planning the next stop. A Milepost or a Fireside built into the cabin. If the app looks awkward on any of those, you stop reaching for it. If it looks like it was made for the screen you are on, you use it.
Three modes for three shapes of trip
Along the top of the sidebar, you will now see three tabs. Camping. Driving. Storage. These are not different apps either. They are lenses on the same system, tuned for what you actually need at that moment.
Camping mode is what you have been using. Home, Vehicle, Energy, Water, Air, Map, plus the system pages for Playbill, Peregrine, Config, Deploy, Alarms, and Settings. Climate control up front, device grid to the right, a big All Off when the day is done.
Driving mode is new to Overlook, and this is the one worth taking a second look at. If you follow the blog, you already met the driving dashboard on Spotter a few weeks back. Speed, altitude, satellites, tire pressure, blind spot slots, breakaway, battery, solar, and a strip of running, left, brake, right, and reverse indicators along the bottom. That same dashboard now runs in Overlook itself. On a phone in the cupholder or a tablet clipped to the dash, you get the exact same information Spotter shows, without needing a Spotter. If you already have Spotter mounted up front, it stays the primary readout and Overlook becomes the passenger view, or the check-in from the back seat.
Storage mode is present but not yet doing its job, and this is the one worth being explicit about. The tab is there. The layout is there. The behavior is intentionally not. Storage is where Overlook will pick up the work that Farwatch handles today. Battery slowly self-discharging over a month. Temperature swings inside a locked-up rig. Doors that opened when nobody was around. Motion where there should not be any. The plan is for Overlook to be the one client that surfaces all of it, so the app on your phone is the app on your phone, whether you are sitting in the rig or a thousand miles away from it.
The work that stands between the Storage tab you can see and the Storage tab that actually watches the rig for you is not the UI or the API. Farwatch already has both, and we have been building against them for a while. What is left is authentication and the security posture around remote access. Talking to your rig from the same network it is on is one thing. Talking to it from anywhere on the internet is a different problem, and we would rather take our time getting that layer right than ship a login screen that isn't. When it lands, the second app on your phone goes away, and Storage mode is where it goes.
Where you are, without asking the internet
This is the addition we are proudest of in this release. The header on the Camping home used to greet you with the date and a decimal latitude and longitude. Useful once. Uninteresting the other three hundred times. Now it reads more like a postcard. Sunday, July 5. Jackson, Wyoming. 6,237 feet.
Under the hood, there is a new container in the Headwaters stack called geocoder. It takes a latitude and longitude and hands back a place name. That may sound routine, until you notice what is missing from the recipe. There is no call to Google. No call to Mapbox. No API key. No account. No monthly quota. No terms of service that reserve the right to log the coordinates you looked up.
The container ships with a compact index of populated places built from open data, and it does the lookup locally, on the gateway sitting in your rig. Your GNSS fix goes to the box next to your batteries and stops there. If you are camped in a spot with no cell service, it still works. If you are camped in a spot with cell service and you would still rather not send your coordinates to a third party every few seconds, it still works.
Driving mode borrows the same service for its top strip, so as you roll into a new town, the name changes with you. Overlook feels a lot more like a rig that knows where it is, and a lot less like an app that just prints numbers at you.
This is what we mean when we say TrailCurrent is edge-first. Reverse geocoding is the kind of feature that quietly turns into a data pipeline for someone else in most products. Here it is a Docker container next to your inverter that talks to nobody.
Units that match your brain
If you think in miles per hour and Fahrenheit, TrailCurrent should not force you to squint at kilometers and Celsius. And if you think the other way around, the reverse.
Settings now has a Units panel. Three choices. Speed in mph or kph. Temperature in Fahrenheit or Celsius. Altitude in feet or meters. Toggle whichever you like. The change takes effect everywhere at once, from the driving dashboard to the air quality card to the elevation readout on the home page.
The important detail is what does not change under the hood. Sensor data is still stored in its native, unconverted form. Only the display layer flips. That means if you share a system with someone whose preferences differ, or you look back at your data six months from now, the numbers you recorded are still true regardless of which set of units you were looking at that day.
Notifications, honestly scoped
Overlook can now surface alarm notifications on your device while the app is open and the screen is awake. The alarm bell has always been the alerting spine of the system, and this is the first step in letting it reach off the page to get your attention on the device you are holding.
We want to be careful about what we promise here, because a web app is not a native app, and pretending otherwise is how people get burned. If you close the browser tab, notifications stop. If you background the app, notifications stop. What this release delivers is a real, useful alert while you are inside Overlook. You will hear a chime and see a system notification when a sensor fires, without watching for the badge to change.
For the case where you want alerts on your phone with the app closed, our current answer is Outbound, the native Android app, which can hold onto push tokens and deliver notifications the way an app store app is allowed to. We will keep pushing what Overlook can do within the constraints of the web platform, and we will keep telling you exactly where the wall is.
A note for people who install Overlook in the rig
If you are running Overlook full-screen on a wall-mounted tablet or a cabin display, this release should feel like a step up without changing your workflow. The sidebar is there. Your mode tabs are at the top. Your last selected page is preserved. Light and dark toggles are still in the bottom-left where they were.
The Trailer setting under Settings lets you tell Overlook whether your rig is a single, tandem, or triple axle. Driving mode uses that to draw the right number of tire slots and to lay out the pressure readouts sensibly. If you have not looked at Settings in a while, that toggle is new and worth setting once.
What is next
Storage mode is the biggest thing on the near list. The API is there, the UI is well understood, Farwatch already does the monitoring end of it. The work is the authentication and remote-access story, and that is what gets attention next. When it ships, Farwatch's job moves into Overlook and you have one client instead of two.
Locales already cover the display units most people care about. The other side of that is language, which is a bigger commitment and requires community help to do right. If English-plus-something-else matters to you and you would help translate, come say hi in Discord. That is how we find out which languages to prioritize.
Reverse geocoding today is coarse enough to be useful and cheap enough to run on Headwaters. There is a version that would also do points of interest, nearby campground names, and the road you are on. That is a heavier index and a heavier lift, and we would rather ship this and see how you use it before we go further.
Update Overlook the way you always do, from Deploy inside the app, or by pulling the latest images if you run it by hand. Feedback goes to Discord or to GitHub issues. The rig knows where it is now. Tell it what to do about that.