Touchscreen status panelLive

Dashboards live in browser tabs nobody has open. This one lives on the wall. A Raspberry Pi drives a 10-inch touch panel that boots straight into a full-screen kiosk and stays there, showing a curated slice of whatever backend it is pointed at. In the lab it shows Athena's boards; for a customer it would show theirs.

What is on the glass

• Header: a large clock and date, a weather chip, and a system-health pill that turns amber or red when anything upstream is unhealthy.
• Three compact tiles: items that need a reply, today's next events, and the count of real breaches in the last 30 days.
• One wide tile: current conditions, wind, and feels-like, next to a live weather radar centered on the site, with chips for every active tropical system. Named storms turn amber; hurricanes turn red.
• Alert bars across the top for priority mail, storms, and fresh breaches, each dismissable or acknowledgeable from the panel.

Built for touch, not for a mouse

• Tap a tile and it expands into a detail view with big Done and Not important buttons and an oversized Back. Acknowledging an item here is the same action as on the desktop console, so the two never disagree.
• The kiosk browser has no address bar and no back button, so nothing on the panel is allowed to navigate away. External links render as plain text, and long-form content such as hurricane advisories opens in an in-app viewer with a 58-pixel close target.
• Motion respects the reduced-motion preference; a busy operations floor does not need a pulsing wall.

Engineering that keeps a wall panel alive for months

• Patch, don't repaint. Data refreshes every 60 seconds by updating elements in place, so the radar layer never reloads and the panel never flickers.
• Heartbeat. The panel posts a heartbeat once a minute. If the backend has not heard from it in three minutes, the status board flags the panel offline, so a frozen display is noticed before someone walks past it.
• Self-updating. The page hashes itself every 90 seconds and reloads when a new version is deployed. That only works if deploys are atomic, so the backend writes a temp file and renames it into place; a half-written page once took the panel down and taught that lesson.
• Fits the hardware. A single media query re-flows the layout into a one-row ribbon for ultrawide bar displays, and the radar falls back to stacked still frames on GPUs that cannot composite a live map.
• Boots to the app. A systemd service launches the browser on power-up, recovers it if it crashes, and needs no keyboard on site.

For a customer

The panel is a thin client. It needs a Pi, a display, a network, and a JSON endpoint to read from. Everything shown is decided by the backend, which means the same hardware can front a dispatch queue, a plant floor, a clinic's schedule, or a security operations summary, with the same tap-to-acknowledge flow and the same offline detection.