deskmate

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

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:

• An ESP32 development board
• A 2.7" SHARP Memory Display by Adafruit
• A rotary encoder (similar to this one from Adafruit)
• Three mechanical switches from Pimoroni

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:

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/.