NSX-EV Dashboard

Home > Portfolio > NSX-EV Dashboard

This is an ongoing project. This post was last updated 8 May 2023.

Designed to look like an F16 fighter jet, the first Honda/Acura NSX is often lauded as one of the worlds best sports cars. It’s Japanese precision made to beat Ferrari, perfected by Ayrton Senna himself.

Case profile
ClientJeff
URLhttps://www.instagram.com/red_goes_green/
ExpertisesEmbedded systems
UX/UI
JavaScript
CSS
Introduction

Initially I came into contact with the car through this video with almost half a million views.

It fascinated me how this legendary sports car was now combined with a modern, clean and electric drivetrain. This car had no engine in it and at over 200.000 miles, it’s the perfect update.

The search

Determined to find out more, I found the cars Instagram page. When I saw this post of a web browser displaying the cars information, I knew I could make this look and feel like it came from the factory with this setup. I reached out to Jeff and we came to an understanding about his goals and my capabilities.

Challenges

With the car being in California, it meant there was 8766km of distance between us. There would be no hands-on time for me to tweak things. I had to find normal words to explain what I was doing and what I needed Jeff to try for me. We also adopted an iterative approach: every little feature and detail would be tried by Jeff. It would be used in the real world and evaluated, which meant I had to find efficient ways of rolling out updates which were quick yet consistent.

Heritage meets modernity

After some deliberation, we found Jeff wanted to include things from Honda’s heritage, like the S2000 digital gauge cluster. He also pointed me to some other EV’s. I identified Honda’s fonts, gained inspiration from Honda’s current offerings (2nd NSX, Civic Type R…) and came up with a basic concept.

The NSX dashboard web app.
Push comes to shove

The dash runs on a Raspberry Pi connected to a 7″ screen. The design consists of the top black bar, which is a permanent fixture displaying the current power output, drivemode and warning lights. The space below displays several “pages”, which the user can navigate through to display other information like raw data and errors pulled from the control hardware.

Gallery

    WORK WITH ME

    Get in contact

    This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

    A copy of this form will be sent to the specified e-mail address.

    rockylinux.org

    Home > Portfolio > rockylinux.org

    What is Rocky Linux?

    Rocky Linux is a free and open source operating system meant to be bug-for-bug compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux®. It is under intensive development by the community. It’s a brilliant project and I decided to give something back.

    A screenshot of the Rocky Linux website.
    BeneficiaryRocky Enterprise Software Foundation
    URLrockylinux.org
    ExpertisesGatsby
    Tailwind CSS
    My contributions

    In this issue, which was open for about 4 months, a suggestion for a dark mode for the website was made. Consequently, I decided to pick it up to research Gatsby and Tailwind CSS and put it into practice at the same time. It was done on April 27th and with minor changes was merged on May 5th 2022. You can see the small changes made by comparing it from here and the Rocky site.

    In addition, I noticed was that at the time there were no Dutch translations. I took it upon myself to contribute nearly all of them, with some other people chiming in afterwards.

    What I learned
    • Tailwind works really well and has more features than Bootstrap.
    • Gatsby (a JavaScript based front-end framework) is also awesome and very easy to develop with, some lessons I even put into Majorak.
    Why is this project important?

    Before Rocky Linux existed there was an operating system called CentOS (Community ENTerprise Operating System), a free enterprise OS built from the same source code as RHEL. It exists downstream of the paid license RHEL. In other words, the code it incorporates has already been tested thoroughly and run in production environments.

    CentOS was more reliable and stable than the real product, costing nothing with commercial support generally less expensive. Most importantly, hundreds of thousands of projects, people and companies relied on it.

    What went wrong?

    After Red Hat took over CentOS in January 2014. After that, they decided to kill the project in late 2020. They replaced it with CentOS Stream. Therefore, countless users of CentOS who had recently upgraded to the latest version, expecting updates for years to come now had no new security updates coming…

    The alternatives
    • Cough up the RHEL license costs.
    • Switch to the less stable CentOS Stream.

    Gregory Kurtzner, the original founder of CentOS, decided to step up and create Rocky Linux to fill the void. Rocky not the only alternative, similarly Alma Linux exists, but Rocky Linux above all is the purest and the most neutral one.

    Majorak

    Home > Portfolio > Majorak

    What is Majorak?

    Majorak is a custom built templating PHP framework built on ADR principles. This will be a quite technical read so it is perhaps better to know what MVC is. It’s also noteworthy that as of 19/10/2022, this software is not production ready or feature complete.

    What’s so unique about it?
    Source

    Regular frameworks, like Symfony or Laravel, are built on MVC principles: Model, View and Controller. Those three are originally meant for GUI applications like the browser you are using to read this, where Model, View and Controller may interact with each other, passing on information. It doesn’t really fit neatly into the space of a web application.

    A diagram showing the relationship between Action, Domain and Responder in ADR frameworks. It's how Majorak works!
    Source

    In short, ADR consists of Action, Domain and Responder. The Action is the entry point, and does nothing other than pass on the information it receives to the Domain. The Domain may manipulate that information, interact with a database, or invoke other Actions to receive more information. Then, it passes an object, the DomainPayload, on to the Responder. That in turn will render the app.

    It follows the World Wide Webs request ➝ response in a much neater way. This makes building these web applications much simpler and effective although creating traditional GUI programs is probably ill-advised with it.

    Current status

    Majorak is currently fully working in terms of ADR. However, running a real modern website or web app is still impossible.

    One of the benefits of being a freelance webdeveloper is that I am endlessly more flexible in the technologies I choose for specific projects. Majorak has become a bit of a pet project, as I would eventually like to really put it to work for API’s, web apps or even convert my own website. If you are interested in helping develop it, you can have a gander on GitHub. If you wish to know more about ADR, you can look here.