Every Stop on the Trip, Before You Leave

Build the trip stop by stop and each one shows the conditions where it is, on the date you will be there. Not where you are standing now — where you are headed, camp by camp.

The outlook answers here. This answers there.

Everything else in the app is about the ground under your feet. That is the right answer to most questions and the wrong one to this: you are leaving on Friday, there are six camps in it, and the only thing you actually want to know is which of them are going to be any good.

So every stop carries its own coordinates and its own date, and gets its own read. Six stops, six different places, six different days. A stop 400 km north is a different sky, and it is treated as one.

How far ahead it is honest for

Ten days of coverage, and it does not pretend they are equal. The line is not really about the weather data — it is about what the app is willing to work out from it.

• Today and the next three days — the full hour-by-hour forecast. This band is the only one where the app works out a stop's best charging window, and the only one where it will judge the night.
• Four to nine days out — a day summary, badged OUTLOOK: how cloudy, the temperature range, the chance of rain. No charging window and no overnight verdict. Tap the day and the app says so in its own words — Specific charging windows lock in within 3 days of the date.
• Further out — Re-check closer to date, and nothing drawn.

A stop two weeks out starts blank, firms into an outlook as the trip approaches, and picks up its window and its overnight answer once it is inside three days. You watch it sharpen as you get closer, which is the honest way round.

One detail worth having on an outlook day: the cloud figure is averaged over the daylight hours only, because cloud at midnight charges nothing. The temperature range covers the whole day, so the low is an overnight number, not a daytime one.

Build the trip as far ahead as you like, though. It is the weather that has a horizon, not the plan — the stops, the nights and every note you attach to them work the same six months out as they do the night before you leave.

What a trip is made of

Up to 31 stops — a full month of nightly camps — each with a place, a date and how many nights you are staying. Start and end points sit outside that: home, a mate's place on the way, wherever you are finishing. They anchor the route without pretending to be camps, so they carry no nights and no arrival tracking.

The route hands off to Apple or Google Maps in one tap, as a proper multi-stop set of directions. The app builds the link on the phone and the operating system opens it — nothing is sent to Apple or Google by us. Maps has its own limit, though: past about eleven points the app warns you with Maps app may show only the first ~10 stops, so a month-long itinerary is better handed over in legs. Once a trip is running, the handoff carries only the stops you have not reached yet.

Each stop inside the three-day forecast band also gets its own best charging window, worked out at that stop's coordinates on that stop's own clock. Hazard warnings ride along per stop, for today and tomorrow only — a thunderstorm six days out has moved by the time you get there, so the app stops showing one past tomorrow rather than letting it read as a plan.

Every stop runs on its own clock

This is the thing to hold on to the moment a trip crosses a time zone. Every time the app shows for a stop is that stop's local time — the sunrise, the solar noon, the sunset, the hourly strip and the charging window. None of them is your phone's clock converted; they are the clock on the ground where you are headed.

So a phone in Sydney planning a camp in Western Australia reads that camp's sunrise in Western Australian time. A 6:12 am rise means 6:12 am when you are standing there, which is the only version of it worth planning around. Nothing on screen spells the zone out, so the rule is simply this: a stop's times belong to the stop.

The dates work the same way. The day rows under a stop are the trip's own days, counted off the start date you set — but whether one of them is today, still ahead or already gone is judged against the date at the stop, not the date where you are standing. That is what keeps a stop's forecast band honest when you are planning it from ten hours away.

That clock decides one more thing. A stop's today row stops being a forecast once the sun has gone down there: with nothing left to harvest, the app switches to reading your battery live and walking it down to the morning, so the row answers as a percentage at sunrise+2hrs instead of a watt-hour shortfall. It only does that when the trip is planned on the gear you are actually running — on any other rig that percentage would describe a battery you are not taking.

Will the battery make it, stop by stop

Once the app has a few full days of your battery's own readings, each stop says how its nights look: covered, or short by about how much. It compares what that day's sky can give your panels against what your gear really uses — measured off your battery over Bluetooth, never the figure you typed. Three full recorded days on that exact rig is the floor, and under it the app says so rather than guess.

The verdict only reaches days inside the three-day forecast band, because those are the only ones carrying an hour-by-hour sky to work a harvest out from. A six-camp fortnight gets answers on the nights nearest you and blanks on the rest — and it firms up on its own as the trip comes closer.

The line across the top of each stop is the one to read, because it counts what it could not answer as well as what it could. A good stop reads 3 nights · all covered. A stop reaching past the horizon reads 2 covered · 1 not forecast yet. A rig still building its record reads 2 need a few more days of readings, which points at your own data rather than at the weather.

A night that has already been and gone is counted as 1 past instead — different from "not forecast yet", because that one never resolves. And where a night does fall short, the line underneath names it and gives the size of it: night 2 short by ~140 Wh. Never a trip total, because nothing knows what the battery starts the trip at.

Each trip names the rig it is planned on, as soon as you have a panel, a battery and a camp gear set saved. Leave it alone and it follows the rig you run — and if something is switched off for now, the last rig that was running. Taking the camper trailer instead of the tourer? Tap Rig for this trip and pick it. Need one you have not saved? Build it from there: it takes the trip's name, and you choose the panels, battery and camp gear yourself.

Picking or building a rig for a trip does not change what you are running today. Delete a rig a trip was using and the trip asks you to Select a rig — it will not guess which gear you meant, and every night at every stop stays blank until you tell it.

When the signal goes

The trip screen fetches its forecasts fresh, so the answer to "what happens out of range" is worth knowing before you are out of range. Open a trip while you still have bars and what it fetched stays available for the rest of that session; lose signal after that and the screen keeps showing it under Working offline — forecasts as of 2h ago, with the age on the banner so you always know how old the sky is.

Camps within about 50 km of each other share a single read, which saves a lot of waiting on a river run but means they do not each hold their own copy of it. So on a tight cluster you can lose signal and find one stop still showing its forecast while its neighbours have gone quiet.

Where there is nothing stored to fall back on — a cold start out of range, most often — the app says so rather than drawing you a forecast it does not have. The stop reads Couldn’t load weather for this stop., and underneath, Re-open the trip when you have a stronger signal.

The trip itself — every stop, every night, every note you have written — is on the phone and needs no signal at all.

It knows when you've arrived

Two separate moments, and they behave differently on purpose.

Starting the trip. Open the app at your first real camp within a couple of days either side of the planned start date, and it offers to begin the trip. It asks rather than assumes, and you can start one by hand at any time regardless. A stop that is your saved home location never triggers the offer, which is what keeps the app quiet on the driveway.

Arriving at a camp. Once the trip is running the app watches the next stop you have not reached yet — only that one — and marks it arrived on its own when you get there, with a banner naming the camp and which night of the stay you are on (day 1 of 3).

It will not mark you in before the day you were due there: late is fine, early is refused. And skip a camp altogether and the automatic side goes quiet for the rest of the trip, because it will not step over a stop you never got to.

The distance it uses is deliberately different depending on how you entered the stop: within 10 km for a place you named, within 2 km for one you dropped as coordinates. A town is an area and a coordinate is a point, and treating them the same would either fire early or never fire at all.

The part that gets better every trip

The forecast is the reason you open it. The notebook is the reason you keep it.

Mark a trip complete — or, on a trip you actually started, let it close itself once the last night has passed — and it opens as a Trip review: a rating for How was this trip?, then three boxes of words. Highlights — what was awesome?, Lowlights — avoid next time and Overall — general notes. Underneath that sits a glowing nudge, Review each stop below, because the per-stop notes are the half nobody scrolls far enough to find.

Each camp along the way gets its own description — and that is deliberately not a star.

Four stars tells future you nothing. It does not say why, and it certainly does not say what to bring. "Mozzies were shocking here, but the spot 25 km on was mint" is the kind of thing that is worth having, and no rating field could ever have held it. The stars are a one-glance summary of the trip as a whole; the words are where the value is.

Your past self, waiting at the stop

Here is where it compounds. Notes are filed against the place, not the trip, so they outlive the trip that created them.

The filing happens when you mark the trip complete: every stop you wrote a note on folds into that place's record as a visit, and the app then asks, camp by camp, whether the note is worth keeping as the place's standing one. A one-off — "chock the van, it slopes" — stays with the trip. Something permanent gets promoted.

Add a camp you have stayed at before and the app opens with You've been here before, your Current notes for the spot, and Past visits listing every stay with the trip it belonged to and what you wrote at the time. Three years and four trips later, that spot still has your own briefing attached to it — how the site actually sat, what the mornings were like, which gear earned its space.

It matches on position rather than on the name, within about 200 metres, so re-typing the place slightly differently still finds your notes and a GPS drift between visits does not spawn a duplicate. Pick a spot half a kilometre down the river and the app treats it as the new place it is.

It is honest for the same reason it is useful: it is yours. Your standards, your rig, what actually worked for you — not a stranger's rating of a site they saw once in different weather. And the notebook never leaves the phone, so your good spots and your blunt opinions stay yours.

What it doesn't do

It does not route you or optimise your drive — it hands the route to Maps and lets Maps do what Maps is for. And it does not know your site: the trees, the valley wall, the ridge that takes your morning. The read is weather and sun position for the coordinates, never a survey of the ground.

Which is the best argument for writing the note. Shading is the one thing the app cannot see and you can — and once it is in the notebook, it is there for good.

What leaves the phone, and what doesn't

There's no account, no tracking and no analytics of any kind. Your trips, your stops, your ratings and your place notebook are stored on the device and are never uploaded, shared or synced — there is nowhere for them to go.

The one thing that does leave is the weather request. To tell you what the sky is doing at a camp, the app has to ask about that camp, so each stop's coordinates go out with its forecast request and nothing is stored at the other end. Opening the route hands a link to your phone's own Maps app, and typing a place name hands that name to your phone's own search — both of those are the operating system's, not ours.

Worth the drive

The Trip Planner is part of Solar Spotter Pro — a one-off purchase, no subscription. There is no free slice of it: on free the trip card on the main screen is an invitation rather than a trip, reading Pro saves your planned route, every campsite, and forecasts the conditions at each one. The overnight verdicts lean further still, on the Pro Bluetooth link to your battery, because they are built from what your rig actually drew rather than what you typed.

Solar is the quiet part it handles in the background; the trip, and the record you build of it, are the point.