app/docs/interface/dashboards.md

Dashboards and panels

A dashboard is a grid of widgets bound to message names — the same names that wire the graph. It is its own document rather than a set of nodes, so it reads across flows without belonging to any of them, and a flow stays the logic it was.

There is no second tool and no separate deployment. You build the panel next to the thing feeding it.

Building one

Dashboards → New dashboard, then drag widgets onto the grid from the widget picker and bind each to a message.

Like flows, dashboards are drafts until you publish. A wall panel reads only the published version, so a half-arranged page never reaches the wall.

On a phone the dashboard is read, not arranged: the grid stacks to one column and dragging is off. Picking a widget and editing its settings still works.

The widgets

Display

Widget	Binds to	Notes
Value	anything	a formatted reading with a unit and a precision
Gauge	float, int	min, max, unit
Chart	float, int	up to five series; see Two kinds of chart below
Bar	float, int	up to eight readings, a row each, with a scale per row
Icon	numbers, booleans, weather strings	maps a value onto a glyph
Text	—	markdown you write; a label, a note, an instruction
Agenda	list	upcoming items, e.g. from a calendar connector
Forecast	list	a short outlook strip
Notification	record	title, body and severity — what an alert channel writes
Clock	—	the time, in a size a wall can read

Every widget carries a title, and Show title decides whether the panel draws it. Turned off, the tile is just the reading — which is what a row of gauges under one heading wants. The title is still the widget's name: what a screen reader calls its controls, and what a published value is labelled with.

Input

Widget	Publishes	Notes
Button	a fixed value	one-shot: run it, open it, reset it
Switch	bool	on/off
Slider	float, int	min, max, step
Input	text or a number	free entry
Dropdown	one of a list	a mode, a scene, a preset
Colour	[h, s, v], [r, g, b] or "#rrggbb"	a hue wheel with saturation and brightness, for an RGB fixture

The colour wheel sends [h, s, v] by default — hue 0-360 degrees, saturation and value 0-100 percent, which is what a DMX encoder expects — and its Sends setting switches that to [r, g, b] (0-255 each) or to a "#rrggbb" string, because fixtures differ. The first two bind a list message, the third a str.

A control publishes the message it is bound to, exactly as a node would. On the flow canvas it is drawn as a labelled endpoint feeding the nodes that read it, so nobody has to guess where the value came from.

Typed bindings

Widgets are type-checked against the message the same way ports are: a switch takes a bool, a gauge takes a number, an agenda takes a list, a notification takes a record. Bind one wrong and the editor says so rather than drawing nothing. The same table is enforced on the server.

Charts are the exception worth knowing: because identity across five series is carried by lightness alone, a chart with more than one series always draws a legend.

Two kinds of chart

Live. Bind up to five messages and the chart draws the engine's own ring buffer of recent values, extended over the socket as new ones land. Nothing else is involved. This is what you want for "the last few hours of the living room".

Querying. The chart publishes a request — the window and resolution it wants — exactly as a slider publishes a value, and draws the series some flow answers with. What serves that request is the flow's business: typically a small Python node that builds a Flux query, an InfluxDB node that runs it, and another Python node that shapes the rows.

That indirection is the point. The widget never learns which database answered it, so swapping the store is a change to one flow and nothing else. The answer also states what it was computed for, so an answer to a different question is ignored rather than two charts overwriting each other's picture.

Dashboard settings

Most of what a dashboard carries is a widget: a tile bound to a message. A handful of things are not, because they belong to the whole surface rather than to any tile on it — and a screen bolted to a wall has nobody standing at it to set them.

Setting	Is	Driven by
Look	Material or Glass	a str message
Theme	System, Light or Dark	a str message
Palette	the dashboard's colours, in order	a list message
Background	the URL of an image	a str message
Touch	touch friendly on or off	a bool message
Lock	read-only on or off	a bool message

They all work the same way, and both halves are optional:

• Just a value. Set Theme to Dark and that dashboard is dark wherever it is shown, whatever the device or the browser prefers. This costs no flow at all, and it is what most wall panels want.
• Driven by a message. Pick one in Driven by and a flow takes the setting over, exactly as it drives a tile. The value you set stays the fallback: what the dashboard uses before the first message arrives, and whenever the message is silent.

A bound setting is type-checked like a widget binding — a Theme pointed at a float is refused by the editor and by the server — and the panel's credential is extended to it, so a paired screen may read its own theme message and nothing further.

There is no schedule field, on purpose. A schedule is a node publishing to the bound message: an inject with a cron expression, feeding a change node that maps the hour onto a palette, is the whole of "warmer after sunset" — and the same channel then serves anything else you want to drive, including locking a panel down remotely.

Look

Material lays flat, tonal cards on a plain ground. Glass floats translucent tiles over a soft, slowly moving one. They are two complete sets of components, not two stylesheets — but they are the same dashboard: every widget, every control and every keystroke behaves identically, so switching look never changes what a panel can do.

Palette

A palette is an ordered list of colours, and position is the role:

#	Role
1	the ground the dashboard sits on
2	the surface a widget is
3	the primary — fills, active controls, the first chart line
4	the accent — the second chart line
5	text
6+	further chart colours

Paste a coolors.co link (or a list of hex colours) and the whole dashboard is recoloured — every widget, the rail and the charts. Leave the later roles off and they are worked out from the ones you gave, so three colours are a whole dashboard. Rotate turns the list when the roles landed in the wrong order. Text that could not be read on a surface is replaced with black or white there, so no palette can produce a line nobody can see.

While a palette is set, Theme is idle: the first colour is the ground, so whether the panel reads light or dark is already decided by the palette itself. Fault and success keep their own colours in every palette — a failure must never be paintable as a reading.

Background

An image drawn under the widgets, covering the canvas. It replaces the ground the Glass look brings with it. Bound to a message, a flow decides the picture.

Touch

Bigger controls, and nothing that only happens on hover. A phone gets this anyway, from its own width; a wall panel has no way to say so for itself.

Lock

Lock is a read-only surface, not a permission. The controls stay visible, stop publishing and read as disabled, and the panel says Read-only in the corner. What a paired screen is allowed to reach is still decided by its own credential, below.

Showing one

• /view/{name} — a browser tab pointed at one dashboard. Needs an ordinary session.
• Panels — a named device that pairs instead of logging in. Below.

Panels: hanging a screen on a wall

A wall tablet has no keyboard, so it pairs.

1. Dashboards → Panels, add a panel named after where it hangs, and tick the dashboards it shows. More than one and the screen draws a rail to switch between them.
2. Point the device's browser at the link the dialog shows. The device then displays a six-character code.
3. Type that code into the same panel's Pair device field. The line under it names what is holding the code — check it is the screen you just hung, because approving adopts whatever answered. The screen picks the credential up within a few seconds and never asks again.

What the screen holds is not a login. It reaches that panel's published dashboards and the messages its own widgets read or publish, and nothing else — a message no tile on it draws is refused in both directions.

The credential cannot be made strictly read-only, and that is honest rather than an oversight: a querying chart publishes its request, and a control on a panel is the reason you put one there. The dashboard's own Lock setting above stops its controls publishing and can be driven by a flow, which is how you quieten a screen remotely — but that is the surface behaving, not the credential being narrowed.

Deleting the panel revokes the credential and the assignment together, which is how you retire a device and what it showed. Unpairing revokes only the credential: the panel, its dashboards and their arrangement stay exactly where they are, and the screen falls back to asking for a new code — which is how you swap the device out without rebuilding what hangs there.

!!! note "If the link is wrong"

The pairing link is built from the installation's `FRONTEND_HOST`. If that
is not the address devices on your network actually reach, fix the setting
rather than the link: it is the same one password-reset mails and the OAuth
metadata are built from.

A screen somewhere you cannot reach

Another building, someone else's network, no route in. An installation enrolled with a portal shows a second link, https://hub.${DOMAIN}/i/{installation-id}/panel, and the same three steps work through it: the portal serves that one page without a session, forwards the pairing calls down the tunnel, and mints the credential when you approve the code. The pairing line then reads via portal.

The portal names the panel and nothing else. What the panel may read is decided on the installation, on every call, by the same check a locally paired screen passes. Two differences: it acts as the account the installation was enrolled with rather than as whoever approved it, and deleting the panel stops it here immediately while the portal's copy of the token expires on its own — which is also why unpairing, which works on a credential this installation signed, does not reach a remote screen. Revoke that one at the hub.

See also

• Payload types — what a widget can bind to
• Flows, nodes and messages — where the names come from
• Accounts and the portal — reaching all of this from outside