Mobile field testing
Real conditions. Real products. Real results.
Short lab tests rarely reveal moisture, vibration, condensation, power management, daily use, and maintenance problems. CapnCoil is built around the opposite approach — prolonged exposure, repeated daily use, and changing field conditions.
What CapnCoil Is
A self-contained environment for long-duration, real-world evaluation.
A working Ford Transit van and an open-source head unit, built to be used every day through a Canadian winter so that products can be evaluated under the conditions they actually have to survive — not a staged installation and not a bench test.
The Van
A Transit build focused on year-round living, off-grid power, winter operation, and practical systems integration — a real environment for evaluating how products perform under prolonged exposure and daily use.
Field Testing
Real-world evaluation of electronics, power systems, tools, and equipment under cold-weather, off-grid, and daily-use conditions — with documented findings and practical improvement suggestions.
The Head Unit
An open-source RV head unit for Ubuntu laptops with touchscreen support: navigation, media, Bluetooth calling, cameras, and system monitoring in one driving-optimised interface.
Testing Focus Areas
What the platform evaluates.
Cold-weather performance
Moisture and condensation behaviour
Power draw and charging patterns
Vibration and storage durability
Daily setup and maintenance
User-level failure modes
The Platform
Instrumentation, not just a vehicle.
The van carries real power management, thermal monitoring, and data logging, and the head unit reports on its own hardware. Anything tested here can be measured rather than merely observed.
- Target environment: four-season northern use
- 4:3
- Target environment: four-season northern use
- Camera slots supported by the head unit
- 8
- Camera slots supported by the head unit
- Head unit licence, fully open source
- Apache-2.0
- Head unit licence, fully open source
- Design target for cold-start operation
- -30°C
- Design target for cold-start operation
Product evaluation
Have something that needs real-world validation?
CapnCoil takes technical partnerships, product evaluation, and field validation programs. Start with the product, the context, and the outcome you need — and we will tell you honestly whether the lab is the right place for it.