Took Scout along on a trip from Cleveland to Phoenix last fall to visit a little hot springs place with rescued cats.

Tested it on the flight to see what it’d do. Wasn’t designed with airline speeds in mind, so it kept crashing.

But it kept restarting gracefully. Same screen, last-known position, pretty much ready to go. One of the design goals on Scout is always to have helpful information. So mission accomplished

A few firmware tweaks since to handle plane rides without panicking.

More from this trip coming. Desert maps, field-test scenes, whatever turns up in the camera roll.

Verne

Quick version: my dice business at dicemakers.com had a busier holiday season than I expected. Late November through early spring I was downstairs in the workshop most days, running the dice machines and packing orders. Working on Scout firmware was about all I could do while babysitting the dice machines. The blog went quiet. Scout didn’t.

The biggest thing that changed is power. Scout now sleeps when you stop moving and wakes up when you start. The battery life is looking very promising.

There’s also a safety screen. Hold any button for ten seconds and Scout shows your emergency contact info, full-screen, even from deep sleep. The idea: if something happens to you and someone picks up your Scout, the first thing they see is who to call. GPS keeps recording your track in the background while the screen is up, in case search and rescue ever needs it.

You can drop pins on the map now. You can load images onto the SD card and read them on the e-paper. I’ve been carrying the Red Cross First Aid guide on mine. Freely redistributable, I converted it for Scout, and it’ll probably ship with Scout. Useful in places where I don’t want a phone. Let me know if you have links to other PDFs or freely redistributable info that should be included with Scout.

About battery life: it’s looking like a 6,000 mAh lithium gets about a week of trail life right now, and the device is becoming something I actually want to carry this summer. The GPS is the biggest power draw on Scout, and the new one going into the shipping product is more capable and pulls dramatically less. With it, I’m calculating closer to two weeks under the same use pattern. Not yet field-tested, but close.

Indiegogo this fall. Aiming for late October. I’ll be uploading a run of videos demoing everything Scout can do. The blog stays for longer write-ups like this one. Newsletter sign-up here gets you trail footage and launch updates, about once a month.

Thanks for being patient with the silence. Gotta keep the lights on

Verne

Been working on power usage this week with excellent progress. Was able to get consumption low enough for 10ish days with a 6000 mah lithium battery.

Tested with a paging app that displays .bmp files in order. I put a freely distributable first aid pdf that I converted on the sdcard to view. It works great. I’ll do some better processing of the pdf to bmp prices, but it’s going to be included on Scout. I’ll publish my conversion process and you can put your own stuff on there too

Scout is your mapping companion for hiking, biking, and exploring. Scout is readable in full sun; Sips battery power; and never needs an app, Wi-Fi signal, or login to work.

So … what’s the current status on Scout?
I’ve finalized the feature list and am on track to send prototypes to a few trusted beta testers in late August, with a launch on Indiegogo in late October. I’m aiming for 400–500 pre-orders, with a target ship date of March 2026.

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There are new “Mobile Atlas” maps to test as well as the 1st case draft.

More soon!