“Wazz” is my own web-based dashboard to get an instant overview of the automation at the Randall Museum Model Railroad. It used to be a crummy javascript single-page web page that I had hacked quickly over the years. I decided to entirely rebuild it using React, TypeScript, and Vite.

The source is available on the here: https://github.com/model-railroad/conductor/tree/main/web/wazz

And the web app is deployed here: https://www.alfray.com/trains/randall/wazz/

I used JetBrains’ WebStorm as the IDE; that was a nice step up from my usual VSCode setup. Not much to discuss on the implementation side -- it’s really your typical no-thrills React-TypeScript web app.

The Conductor automation software exports a JSON status, which this reads, and displays. There’s an automatic refresh every 10 minutes. Note that this isn’t hosted in any cloud -- it totally relies on the automation computer at Randall having wifi access to the internet. The uptime for that connection is around 95%. Since it’s mostly a remote view dashboard, I don’t need a perfect uptime, nor do I expect it to have a high traffic load.

I’m essentially the sole user of that dashboard. Which also explains why the display may look cryptic -- it displays exactly what I want the way I want it, with no effort to be legible by people unfamiliar with the Conductor software.