Designing the Chinook's Digital Dashboard
A hybrid Raspberry Pi + microcontroller architecture that runs the whole camper — and keeps working if the screen doesn't.
This is where the two halves of the project meet: fabrication and code. The camper's control system is designed like a small distributed network rather than one big brain.
A Raspberry Pi 5 runs the touchscreen dashboard, maps and media. But it never directly switches a critical load. That job belongs to rugged ESP32 and Teensy controllers wired to relays, sensors and physical fallback switches.
Everything shares one central state model — a single JSON contract describing power, vehicle, habitat, lighting, audio and security. The UI reads it, the controllers publish it, and MQTT keeps them in sync. If the screen reboots, the lights, water and fridge keep working.
It's the same design thinking as the vehicle itself: build reliable, modular systems where one failure doesn't take down the whole rig.