Robot Dashboard Experiment

[bubulux]

I’ve been building a robot over the last couple of days, and while programming I realized I needed a dashboard to monitor certain states and vitals.

What I needed was a way to pass down data updates to my local environment, so I could further utilize them in an Electron app.

The Approach

Since we can receive the print output, I decided to add a monitoring wrapper around the main program.
This wrapper captures the output and writes each line to a CSV file.

• The CSV file is then watched by my Electron app.
• Updates get forwarded to my React hook, which in turn updates the UI.

It works pretty well — at least for my use cases.

Demo

Here’s a short demo. It runs pretty much in real-time — I honestly can’t tell the difference.
In the end, whatever hits your stdout can be forwarded to a local file, and that file can be watched or reacted to:

demo.mp4

Data Format

I chose to use a CSV-style stream, where updates are communicated either as:

• actual data values, or
• "NONE" (meaning: no new data recently).

That way, the most recent data type is always treated as the current value.

HEALTH,LIGHT, PRESSURE_LEFT, PRESSURE_RIGHT, PRESSURE_BACK
INIT, INIT, INIT, INIT, INIT
100, NONE, NONE, NONE, NONE
NONE, GREEN, NONE, NONE, NONE
NONE, NONE, 23, NONE, NONE
NONE, NONE, NONE, 45, NONE
NONE, NONE, NONE, NONE, 67
76, NONE, NONE, NONE, NONE
76, NONE, NONE, NONE, 22

Takeaway

Long story short: you can do pretty much anything with this approach.
It’s a neat solution if you want to build dashboards of any kind.

I’ll add the required base code for this once I’ve gained a bit more experience with the setup. 🙂

Maybe this helps or inspires someone!

Cheers,
Sam