Hardware · in development for 2027
Engine hours that come off the engine.
Most fleets get their engine hours from a dial somebody reads at the ramp, writes on a clipboard, and types in on Monday if they remember. Every maintenance decision and every cost-per-hour figure downstream inherits whatever that number was. The TWC Tech Box wires to the boat once and produces the number itself.
This is not shipping, and it has never run on a boat
Everything below describes a product in development for the 2027 season. No box has been installed and no trip has been recorded. The full status, including what is finished and what is not, is at the bottom of this page rather than buried in it.
What it will record
Engine hours
Seconds the engine was actually turning, not hours the boat was away from the dock. This is the number maintenance intervals and cost per hour are built on, so it is the number the box exists to get right.
Time under way
Moving seconds, separately from engine seconds. The difference between them is idling — at the dock, at the sandbar, waiting on a rider — and it is usually the largest unexamined cost in a season.
Where it went
A GPS track of up to 500 points per trip, thinned on the box and clamped again on arrival, plus start and end position, distance and top speed.
Engine RPM
Peak RPM read off the engine's CAN bus, listen-only. This is what separates a real trip from a battery charger on the dock, and the platform records whether a trip carried it — see below.
Supply voltage
Battery voltage at the start and end of every trip, and on each heartbeat. A battery going soft shows up here weeks before it strands somebody.
Why it reads the bus
A charger on the dock should not be able to invent an hour.
Engine hours are billable. They set maintenance intervals, they drive cost per hour, and on a rental or club boat they can decide what somebody is charged. So the question of where an hour came from is not academic.
The box reads RPM off the engine's CAN bus rather than inferring the engine is running from supply voltage. Voltage rises when a charger is connected to a boat sitting on a lift; RPM does not.
The platform also records which kind of evidence each trip arrived with — RPM present and above idle, RPM present but contradicting the engine time, or no RPM at all — and keeps a review queue of the ones that are not corroborated. A boat with no CAN bus is still a real customer and its hours are still kept; they are just not allowed to look identical to measured ones.
How it will report
One message per trip
Not a live stream. The box assembles the whole trip, sends it once when the trip ends, and goes quiet. A separate heartbeat says the box is alive and reports its voltage.
A retry cannot double-count
Each trip carries a key derived from the device and the trip's start time, and that key is unique in the database. A box that loses signal mid-upload and retries produces one trip, not two. The second attempt is answered with the first trip's id.
Its own connection
Cellular, on the module's own included service. No app to open, no phone aboard, nothing for a captain to remember, and no dependency on the guest's handset.
It lands on the booking
The platform attaches each trip to the charter, rental or club reservation that was on that boat at that time, and flags the ones it cannot match confidently rather than guessing.
Refused rather than guessed
A report with an implausible timestamp, a trip longer than seven days, a negative duration or an unrecognised contract version is rejected and recorded as an error. It is never partially written.
What it is not
- Not a live tracker. You cannot watch a boat move on a map in real time, and it is not built to.
- Not a theft alarm, not a geofence, and not a recovery device.
- Not satellite. It needs cellular coverage, which on Lake Travis it has and in open water it may not.
- It records the boat, not the people. No names, no phones, no passenger count — the booking already holds that, and the box has no reason to.
- Not a fuel sensor. Fuel is still entered at the pump; the box tells you the hours to divide it by.
Where this honestly is
- It has never been on a boat. Designed, firmware written, bench work done — and zero devices installed, zero trips recorded, as of 2 November 2026.
- The software side is the part that is finished — receiving a report, checking it, making sure a retry cannot count twice, and attaching it to the right booking. It is waiting on hardware, not on us.
- First units go on Travis Wake Charters' own boats for the 2027 season, because the first operator to find out it is wrong should be the one who owns it.
- There is no price, no order form and no ship date. We will not quote one before a box has run a season.
- Cellular service is included with the module rather than billed monthly, with a data allowance measured for the life of the device. At one short report per trip that is not a constraint, but it is an allowance and not infinity.
Put your fleet on the list
Tell us how many boats, what engines, and where you run. That is genuinely useful to us — engine make decides how hard the bus tap is, and it is the thing most likely to change the order we build in. You will get an email when there is something real to say, and nothing in between. No price will be quoted before a box has run a season.
This goes to a person at hello@xriseexperiences.com, not a queue. There is no waitlist product behind it and no automated sequence — at this stage that would be more machinery than there are leads.
The TWC Tech Box is designed, owned and run by Travis Wake Charters, on its own boats. XRise Tech did not build it and does not own it — Xrise is the software platform it was built against and reports into, and the channel it is sold through. That platform is described across the rest of this section, and how we handle data is on the security page.