Dashbaud

Physical gauges for the digital world

I created a series of physical, wifi-connected gauges to represent the digital world in a non-intrusive way.

The motivation behind the project

We spend an inordinate amount of time looking at screens. It's almost expected in 2025 that you are to be on your phone at all hours of the day, constantly connected. If I want to check on the status of something, like the weather, my next bus, or a follower count - I need to check my phone.

I wanted a way to display, at a glance, things that I care about, or check regularly, in a non-screen format.

My inspiration

Why gauges? As a pilot, I've always used them as a source to get information at a quick glance. When you're in the cockpit, you're quickly analyzing data from a variety of sources at a glance, and gauges are an easy and effective way to communicate information quickly and intuitively. With that I had two major inspirations for this project.

Wall Clock & Barometer

The first was a wall clock and barometer my mum used to keep on her wall. As far as I can remember, it looked like the one above.

Cessna 6Pack

The second inspiration, was what's lovingly referred to by pilots as a 6 pack - the 6 major instruments that are on a non-glass cockpit of a Cessna 150-172.

Internet angry-ometer

A smaller, kind of pre-cursor to this project was my internet angry-ometer. It was a small gauge I built during the pandemic, which connected to the twitter API and determined the general sentiment of tweets in the last 30 seconds, to show on a gauge just how angry the internet was at any given moment.

Building

Here's how I built the project. I'm releasing CAD files and code on my patreon soon, when I've made some improvements.

3D printing

The build started with 3D designing a base plate, a ring cover, and a needle for the gauges.

I created them to be flush with the surface of the dashboard I was installing them on.

I designed the backing plate to fit in a standardized SG-90 servo motor to fit into the plate, and a small needle to fit on top of it.

The dashboard

The dashboard is a $10 dollar wooden bin lid from Ikea that I used a hole saw to drill some holes into.

Electronics and power

The servos are powered by a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W, which connects to my WiFi and handles the PWM signals to control the servo motors. I used the GPIO pins on the Pi to connect to each servo, which allows control of the needle positions.

For power management, I used a small USB power supply that powers both the Pi and the servos through a simple power distribution board. This setup allows the entire dashboard to be powered from a single outlet.

Gauges

Here's a breakdown of all the gauges currently in the dashboard. I designed them all to be easily swappable.

Gauge 1: Run for your train/bus

This gauge uses GTFS data from my trains.fyi project and shows me when to leave to catch my regular commuting train. This was the first gauge I built and shared online - I was fortunate enough to have thousands of people share their feedback and ideas after this.

Gauge 2: What to wear

I often leave my place without an umbrella. This gauge checks the weather every 30 minutes, and considering my personal preferences for temperature, tells me what I'll feel the most comfortable wearing that day (parka, light coat, rain coat, hoodie, t-shirt).

Gauge 3: Weasley clock

Gauge 3 is loosely inspired by the Weasley clock from Harry Potter. Using a custom application plus location bounding boxes, I determine if a friend is at home, the gym, etc.

Gauge 4: It's so over

Gauge 4 retrieves the news articles of the day and performs sentiment analysis on them via a LLM. It then extracts a general positive or negative sentiment score for each article, and averages it to determine if we are "so over" or "so back" for today. I've also considered using it to monitor my latest video's performance on social media.

Gauge 5: Step Competition

Gauge 5 connects to an API to retrieve both mine and a friend's steps from our fitness trackers. It then shows the real time delta between our steps - to ensure I always stay in the lead.

Gauge 6: Monthly Spending

Gauge number 6 connects to my bank via an API and retrieves my current credit card balance, and compares the monthly spending against a set budget in order to show me if I need to slow down with my spending.

Sharing

As a part of the build process, I shared this on social media with my followers, and received a huge response to it.

People really vibe with the concept. In total, the project is sitting at about 4 million total views.

What's Next

I really love the idea of bringing this project into more people's homes, and I'd love to create a productized version, with a pairing application that requires no-code setup for people to connect any source of data they'd like. However, I'm currently weighing this against all the other projects I'm looking to complete.

If you're at all interested in this kind of thing for your home, give me some feedback - I'd love to hear it before I commit to working on something this massive.

That said, I am working on a version two.