[PRE] TestDrive Real-time Dashboard (pre-release)

Introducing TestDrive, A real-time dashboard for visualising Arduino and micro-controller inner workings. Great for tinkering, robotics, and sensor monitoring.

Take a look at the live TestDrive Demo Dashboard

Github repo: https://github.com/blakejakopovic/testdrive
Past discussion can be found here

The goal will be to create a Spark Library that allows you to do something like the following

#include <TestDrive.h>

// Variable to store temperature reading
float my_temp;

void setup() {
  // Initialise TestDrive (using a USB serial connection)
  TestDrive.begin();
}

void loop()
{
  // Read temperature
  my_temp = 23.5; // celsius

  // Update sensor reading using TestDrive
  TestDrive.sendTemperature(my_temp);

  // Delay 250ms before reading sensors again
  delay(250);
}

And automatically get a real-time dashboard to view your sensors and important data - wirelessly.

The dashboard will be distributed as a standalone application (using node-webkit) and should be available for Mac, Linux and Windows.

I Plan to update this thread with Spark specific updates, so you can follow along if you’re interested. I’m open to suggestion and comments. Contributions welcome, but it’s a little early, so I’d like to get a few things settled first.

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Looking awesome! Good job :wink:

Awesome!, thank for sharing @Blake.

That looks really neat. Just checking out the GH repo now. Great work!

Looks good. Really dig the design. It looks like your project is very similar to what I’m doing. I hope you don’t mind if I would use some of your design elements. Check out my page at home.kropp.ca.

I’m using Node.JS for most of the live sensor update traffic but the whole front end is just simple HTML, CSS and Javascript. I’m happy to answer any questions if you have any.

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@kropbj Sure, I modeled the UI off a few dashboards I took a look at. It’s most similar to Geckoboard https://www.google.com/search?q=geckoboard&source=lnms&tbm=isch.

You can check out the current CSS/HTML on github.


I plan to make the dashboard support smart widgets - so things like maps, 3D box representations, etc. And they will benefit from drag/drop and rearrange functionality. I’ve prototyped parts, but I’m not happy with that part yet.

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