Six apps and two remotes

Our van is a pretty high-end build, and everything in it works well. The problem is getting it to work together.

Most things in the van are controlled by a system that came with the build. It does the job, but it's clearly made to work in any vehicle and any setup, and you can feel that. The app is slow to start, and sometimes it doesn't connect at all and I have to force quit it. It only connects over Bluetooth, and the signal is so weak that when I'm outside filling the water, I hold my phone up against the window to see how full the tank is.

Then there's everything else. The air conditioning has its own app and its own remote. The roof fan isn't connected to anything, so once you're in bed, it stays on whatever setting it had. The solar shows volts and amps, and you have to work out yourself how much is actually charging.

The heater is my favorite. It shows that there's an error, but not which one. To find out, we lift up the kids' bed, open a panel and read the small display underneath. And then we still have to Google the code, because it's just a number. The answer is always there, in the manual or on some forum. It's a known thing. So why can't the heater just say it? In Weft, it does.

At some point I counted six apps and two remotes. And every time we add something, it gets worse. When the van got an upgrade, it came with a star ceiling, a sky of small LEDs over our bed. It's really nice, but it also came with its own remote and its own app.

I understand why it ends up like this. Nobody is integrating it. Every company makes its own little silo, and that's it.

We've lived in Finn, our Sprinter, since 2023. We started in Canada, drove up to Alaska, then all the way down to Panama, and now we're in South America. Along the way I gradually started trying different ways to fix this.

The thing that bothered me most was that we had no remote access. Whenever we left the van in storage, I was anxious about the battery and everything else, with no way to check. So the first version was an old Android phone that stayed in the van, connected over Bluetooth to the battery and to the control system. I would screen-share into it from my own phone to check on things. It was quite clunky, but it worked, and from then on it was clear to me that whatever I built had to have remote access built in, for everyone.

There were many attempts after that. In the end I replaced the phone with a Raspberry Pi, which became the prototype for what Weft Core is today. It's a small computer that sits on top of the systems already in the vehicle. Nothing gets replaced or rewired.

Some of the integrations were quite easy, when the equipment is well documented. Others weren't. Getting the van's control system to work was grueling.

But the part I care about most is the experience. I've been designing user experiences for over twenty years, and I'm not satisfied with average. I want things to be right. So I keep polishing, in small steps, one iteration after another. The screens in Weft today have been through thousands of iterations. Knowing the battery is at 64% doesn't help much, for example, but knowing you have about two days off-grid does, and getting to answers like that takes a lot of those small steps.

Living in the van we're designing for helps, because we can't ignore the rough edges. Every Weft release runs in Finn first, and my family are the first users.

Next time I'll write about security, and why we stopped trusting alarms after being broken into twice.