Dashboard

TL;DR The screens on eight surplus all-in-ones show an ops board: bids, ship queue, pickups, repair backlog, cluster health, weather and traffic. They sit on desks around the office and do double duty: a workstation when someone sits down, the board the rest of the time. The same machines are on their way to becoming k3s worker nodes (one has joined so far), and that build gets its own post. It’s one static HTML page in Chrome kiosk mode. No framework server, no Kubernetes workload. Ansible deploys it. 15 scenes sit in a weighted registry and rotate off the wall clock, about 34 seconds each, so eight screens agree without talking to each other. When a fetch fails the page keeps the last good data and shows its age. A board with stale data and a warning beats a blank screen. It’s a different animal from my older home signage system, which is a k8s app with Raspberry Pi kiosks. One real thing it did: on 2026-09-06 the home cluster’s daily Longhorn backup had stopped completing, and the board’s home-cluster card showed the critical alert. Not the same project as the home signage I’ve written about digital signage on k3s before: an Angular app, a handful of Flask services, MQTT, Raspberry Pis driving displays. That’s a proper application and it lives in the home cluster. ...

TL;DR Purpose-built smart-home wall panels are expensive, locked down, and usually underpowered. A used Microsoft Surface Pro 7 — Core i5 or i7, 16 GB RAM, a sharp 12.3" touchscreen — runs about $150 on the surplus market and makes a fantastic wall-mounted dashboard for Home Assistant, Grafana, or whatever you self-host. It’s a full x86 PC behind a great touchscreen, so it runs a real browser with your real dashboards, not a stripped-down panel app. Here’s the build. ...