Sim72 Media and System Dashboard

Use it on your steering wheel’s display, A Vocore, USBD480, Nextion, your phone, a tablet, as an overlay or on a second Monitor.

Useful, informative and funky … what’s not to like!?

What it does?

Media info – What ya listening to (or watching)

Media controls (touch enabled) – play/pause next/previous

Volume Control – increments adjustable in simhub settings (see below)

Audio Sync Lighting – funky dancing light bars

System info – GPU / CPU / Mem / Fan monitoring info

Quick LED switcher – quickly switch led profiles without having to go into simhub (needs configuring – see below)

Time – cos we can all get a bit carried away, right!?

Sim72’s Media N Sys Dashboard

How to install it?

  1. Install simhub if you haven’t already got it
  2. Download the Sim72 Media N Sys Info dashboard (updated link coming soon)
  3. Open Dash Studio and click on Import dashboard (browse to where you downloaded it to and click yes to install prompts)
  4. Configure Simhub for data sources and controls as per steps described below (~5 mins)
import dashboard

How to Start the Dashboard?

For the dashboard to work some configuration needs to be done – steps are described below

  • From the Dash Studio tab, hover over the dashboard image with your mouse, click Start and select where you would like it to be displayed
Simhub – how to start a dashboard on selected screen or device
  • Newly installed dashboards usually appear near the bottom of the list in “Uncategorized” area
  • To organise your dashboards into categories click MORE on the right hand side of the dashboards screen and then either select an existing Category or you can create “new category … “

Configuration Steps

To finalise the install you need to configure some data providers and buttons i Simhub. This should only take a couple of minutes.

  • Hardware Monitoring for GPU CPU etc – needs to be configured in Settings –> System Info
  • You need to tell Simhub what you want to display in the system info areas
    • the values in the drop down menus may be different to what is shown here, and if you have other hardware monitoring plugins like Afterburner you may need to enable them in the top section in order to find the info / values they provide.
system info settings
  • Whilst in the Settings, go to the General tab, scroll down and you can set the System volume change steps

  • Each time you press the volume button, this is how many “steps” the volume is adjusted.
  • Windows uses a range of 0 to 100. The default is 10 steps per press, I use 4.
Setting “volume steps”

Skip the following configuration steps for Quick LED Switcher if you don’t have Arduino LEDs or don’t wish to use these buttons for changing to different LED profiles

  • Quick LED Switcher Buttons are at the bottom of the screen either side of the Sim72 logo.
  • When you switch LED profile the new profile name will appear in place of the sim72 logo for a few seconds.
Quick LED Switcher Buttons
  • If you have different Arduino LED profiles in Simhub then you can use these buttons to quickly scroll through them without having to go in to Simhub to do it.
    • If you don’t have different LED profiles or wish to use them for other things, then these dash buttons can be mapped to any other function available in simhub.
  • To set them up, go to Controls and events –> New mapping
new mapping
  • Select the Source box on the next window (“Button” in screen grab below)
  • Press the LEFT Quick LED Switcher button on your Sim72 Media N Sys dashboard
    • previous_LED_button should appear highlighted in the Source area
  • For the Target select PreviousLEDLayout and click OK
  • Repeat the above steps to map the RIGHT Quick LED Switcher button on the dashboard to NextLEDLayout
Button Mappings

Now it’s time to test it out

Start some music, see the media info, watch the funky light bars, press buttons, monitor your system info and have fun with it.

Want more cool stuff – check out the downloads section

If you appreciate the dash then please buy me a coffee so I can make more funky stuff for you to enjoy.

Troubleshooting tips

  • Windows media doesn’t show – change to another source / remove the System Info mapping for Windows media.
    • Ensure “Run as Administrator” is enabled in Simhub Settings tab, shut down simhub and any media services running or even reboot.
    • Restart Simhub, reconfigure the Windows media provider in System Info.
    • Known issue – Tidal or other providers does not update the media image shown in real time. This is above my paygrade and due to Simhub and media providers or Windows not playing together as smoothly as they should.
      • no known fix for this except to restart Simhub or Tidal
  • No / wrong data showing in System info boxes – double check and amend your selections in the System Info steps. Ensure Simhub has Run as Administrator enabled in Settings tab.
  • Missing / incorrect fonts
    • Phone/Tablet browser – due to the dash using custom fonts, they might not display exactly as they do on a vocore or screen. [Edit: recent Simhub updates are supposed to fix this] There is not real fix I know for this
    • If the fonts are not installed or displaying correctly after installing and restarting Simhub, then
      • download the fonts again and install them manually on Windows.
      • Restart of Simhub and/or Windows may be required.
  • Music / audio light bars not working when using “exclusive mode” (eg. from music apps) – nothing I can do here AFAIK – exclusive mode takes control of the audio output and so bypasses all the Windows audio parameters gathered by Simhub.
    • If you switch to/from exclusive mode and the light bars are not working you may need to restart Simhub to get them working again – currently Simhub seems to “stick” once this setting is toggled, so once you switch to exclusive mode it seems Simhub is unable to find this data again until you restart it.
  • Other issues – try asking in the Simhub channel on Discord, lots of helpful people over there and I lurk there sometimes too.