/deskmate

A tiny MQTT-powered dashboard and control center.

Primary LanguageC++MIT LicenseMIT

deskmate

A hackable & portable MQTT-powered mini dashboard and control center.

Photo of deskmate prototype on a desk

For clarity, in this specific configuration, the display above shows:

  • Left panel - The states of MQTT "smart" switches. Clicking turns them ON/OFF
  • Top right panel - Soil moisture status of some of the plants around the house
  • Bottom right panel - Current temperature in different rooms

Hardware & portability

The main components in the photo above are:

The core software should be fairly hardware-agnostic and the concrete implementations should be relatively portable to a bunch of other boards and displays.

As an example, this repo contains a pure software implementation of the whole system. Here it is running on my macbook:

Screenshot of deskmate running on macos

Software

The software is organized into three directories:

  • code/lib/ - Platform-agnostic core. Relies on abstract input/output systems
  • code/arduino/ - Arduino instantiation of the input/output systems & MQTT client
  • code/sdl2/ - SDL-based software-only instantiation of the input/output systems & MQTT client

Case

The .stl files for the 3D printed frame can be found under case/stl/.