Recently, a coworker mentioned that we should have a dashboard to make some of the metrics we are tracking more visible. It reminded me of this post (via Adafruit) I read about Dashing.

We were able to get Dashing running very quickly. This post about setting up a Dashing dashboard was quite helpful as was this one about installing the right Ruby version. Most of the installations I read about used an external server to host the dashboard, which wasn’t really an option for us. For those that don’t have a good place to host, you can try installing Dashing on the Raspberry Pi, as we did. The raspi doesn’t have a ton of horsepower, so compiling binaries and such will take longer than you might be used to, but it has no problem running Dashing.

So far, I’ve got nothing but good things to say about Dashing. It’s easy to set up, there are a bunch of additional widgets available, and creating your own widgets isn’t difficult.

As an experiment, we cooked up the basic World Cup widget shown here. It has quickly become the most referenced dashboard widget in the office.