Visualise & share
Dashboards
Build a grid of widgets — readings, charts, a map, weather, sensor details, alert status — share it, embed it in your site.
What a dashboard is
A dashboard is a grid of widgets — live readings, charts, a map, local weather, sensor details, alert status — arranged by you and published at its own address, dashboard/<group>/<dashboard>/. It is the third kind of page you can build and share, beside maps and analytics pages, and it follows the same rules: your group can open it, or anyone with a password, or anyone at all. The page refreshes itself (every minute by default), so it can stay open on a wall screen.
Every widget shows something the app already knows how to draw. Nothing on a dashboard writes anything; a visitor can only read what you placed there.
The dashboards hub
Open Settings and choose the Dashboards tab (dashboards). Type a name into New dashboard name and press Create dashboard: it is created in your first group and its builder opens. Each row shows the sensor and widget counts, the group and how it is shared, with Edit → (Builder → with read-only Settings rights), Open ↗ for the rendered page, and a ✖ that deletes the dashboard after a confirmation.
Folders. Dashboards can be filed into folders per group: the New folder box on the hub creates one, each row has a Move control to file the dashboard, and the switcher at the top of a rendered dashboard lists the group's dashboards grouped by folder so a wall screen can jump between them.
The public navigation bar's Dashboards item goes to the deployment's featured dashboard, or to the list of every public dashboard when none is featured.
The builder
The builder is the dashboard itself, editable. The canvas on the left draws every widget live — what you see is what a visitor sees — and the panel on the right holds the palette and the settings of the selected widget. Save dashboard at the top saves the name, the refresh interval and the whole grid at once; sharing is saved separately from the panel below.
| Action | How |
|---|---|
| Add a widget | Press its name under Add a widget. It lands in the first free space at the bottom, pre-set to your first sensor where that makes sense. |
| Move | Drag the widget's header. Widgets in the way are pushed down and float back up into gaps. |
| Resize | Drag the grip at the bottom-right corner. The grid is 12 columns wide; a row is 60 pixels tall. |
| Configure | Click a widget (or its ⚙) and use the settings panel. Every widget takes an optional Title for its header. |
| Remove | The ✖ in the widget's header. |
| Refresh | Refresh every in the toolbar: 15 seconds to 1 hour. A page that is not visible in its tab does not refresh. |
A dashboard may hold up to 40 widgets. On a phone the grid becomes a single column in the order the widgets were arranged, top-to-bottom and left-to-right — unless you give the dashboard a mobile layout of its own.
A separate layout for phones
The Desktop / Mobile switch in the builder's toolbar chooses which arrangement of this dashboard you are editing; a line under the toolbar says which one is on the canvas. A dashboard starts with no mobile layout, and then a screen 720 pixels wide or narrower gets the desktop layout stacked into one column, exactly as before. Nothing changes for a dashboard you never touch here.
Press Mobile and the panel on the right offers Start from the desktop layout — every widget in one full-width column in reading order, which is what a phone shows today, ready to be rearranged — or Start empty. The mobile canvas is the same twelve-column grid drawn at phone width, so a widget you make full width really is full width on a phone, and a pair of half-width tiles really do sit side by side. Everything works as it does on the desktop canvas: drag a header to move, drag the corner to resize, or focus a widget and use the arrow keys (Shift+arrows resize, Delete removes). Save dashboard saves both arrangements at once.
What is not on the mobile layout is not seen on a phone. The panel counts the widgets that are on the desktop layout but missing from the mobile one and names them, with Add the missing … to drop them full-width at the bottom. Remove the mobile layout deletes it and puts phones back on the automatic stacking.
It remains one page: the same sensors, the same alert rules, the same sharing and the same permissions. A visitor who rotates a phone, or drags a desktop window across the 720-pixel line, is switched between the two arrangements as they cross it.
Widgets
| Widget | Shows | Settings |
|---|---|---|
| Time series | One sensor's variables over a window, as lines. Two different units get their own axes. | Sensor, variables, time window (6 hours to 1 year), Use QC-corrected values where a correction exists. |
| Histogram | The distribution of one variable over the window. | Sensor, variable, window, number of bins. |
| Latest values | The most recent reading of one variable, large, with its unit and time — or several variables of the same sensor as a compact grid of value chips. | Sensor; one variable (with optional Red below / Red above bounds that colour the number) or several under Variables; decimals. |
| Sensor info | Site, station, coordinates, interval, variables, access and field notes, plus when it last reported. | Sensor. |
| Map | Pins for the chosen sensors at their stored coordinates, named like the maps pages; highlighted sensors get a larger amber pin with a pulsing halo so they stand out. | Sensors, zoom, names on/off, which sensors to highlight. |
| Local weather | Current temperature, humidity, wind and 24-hour rain, with a chart of recent rain and temperature and the forecast. | A US ZIP code or lat,lon; how much history to show; Display — the chart, or numbers only (now, rain and temperature over the last 24 h and the next 24 h). Weather is fetched by the server and cached for 15 minutes; a visitor's browser never contacts the weather service. The widget names its place rather than repeating what you typed: a ZIP becomes 95616 · Davis, CA, and coordinates that land on one of this dashboard's own sensors take that sensor's name. Coordinates with nothing at them stay coordinates, rounded — we would rather show a right coordinate than guess a town. The line under the chart is a different fact: it says how far the weather model's grid cell is from that place (why that matters). |
| Alert status | One chip per rule — the same state the alert cards show (OK, alerting, paused, no verdict yet). | The rules to show. The picker offers every rule you can read; only rules that watch a sensor on this dashboard are actually served, so a rule picked from another sensor shows the chip Rule not on this dashboard until that sensor is placed on a widget. |
| Recent alerts | The latest alert events for the sensors on this dashboard. | How many. |
| Visualize alert rule | The same chart as Visualize rule on the alert lists: readings against the band the rule is judged by, with the 24h / 3d / 7d / 30d buttons. | One rule. |
| Alert & downtime history | A timeline: one row per chosen sensor showing when it was down (the deadman's no-data incidents, plus any hour with no readings at all) and one row per chosen alert rule showing when it was alerting, over the window. Hover a bar for the times. | Sensors, alert rules, window (6 hours to 1 year; the server clamps a longer request). |
| Text | A paragraph of your own — a caption, an explanation, contact details. | The text. |
| Photo gallery | Several pictures from the group's library as a slideshow: arrows, dots, and an optional auto-advance. | The pictures (in order), fill or fit, auto-advance every 5 s – 1 min or off. |
| Picture | A picture from your group's site library (uploaded in the site studio). | The picture; fill the box or show it whole. |
Which sensors may go on a dashboard. The same rule as maps and analytics pages: any public sensor you can read, and a private sensor only if you could publish it yourself. The sensors a dashboard uses are worked out from its widgets when you save, and the dashboard's data endpoints serve exactly those — a shared visitor can reach nothing else, and needs no token.
Templates
Save as template in a builder's toolbar keeps that dashboard's arrangement — widgets, sizes, positions, titles and settings — under a name, per group. On the hub, Create dashboard can start From template; the new dashboard opens in its builder with the template's widgets — except Picture and Photo gallery widgets, which are dropped because pictures belong to a group's library and a template is meant to be reused across groups — and the Replace sensor panel points every widget that used one sensor at another in one step (variables carry over where the new sensor has the same ones; alert-rule settings are cleared, since rules belong to a sensor). Templates are listed and deleted at the bottom of the hub.
Sharing and embedding
The Sharing panel under the builder works as it does for maps: Private — sign-in required (your group only), Shared link, password required or Public — anyone with the link, and the link to hand out. A shared page asks search engines not to index it. A password-shared dashboard shows the unlock page first, naming the group and who shared it.
A public dashboard can also be drawn inside your group's site. In the site studio (Settings → Landing page), add a Dashboard section and pick the dashboard in the panel on the right; it is rendered live, in full, inside the page, with a link to its own address underneath. A Published dashboards section lists every public dashboard instead, like the maps and analytics listings. If the dashboard stops being public, the section disappears from the site rather than showing an empty box.