Download 0.3.0-rc.6

The candidate that answers one question per row. A review of the whole product on 22 September, driven on the test rig the way a sim racer would drive it, found readings that were right about the property they read and wrong about the question they were answering. This release closes the ones that mattered most, and it ships a panel that talks to a driver and a name spelled the same way everywhere.

A list counted in class is a list of that class. With the position mode set to class, a leaderboard listed the whole field in overall order and numbered it by class position, which on a multi-class grid is three cars called P1 in an order that is the order of none of the numbers. The mode now filters the rows it numbers, everywhere a list is drawn: the leaderboard, the relative and the opponents page on a face's zones, on the companion and on the pit wall, and band D's relative page. A zone's own "My class only" adds to the rig's setting rather than overriding it, so one class counted by its overall places remains a thing a zone can ask for, and the cells of a row answer the question the row is drawn by: the places gained count within the class, the gap on a class list is measured to the leader of that list and the interval to the row above it, and Lead appears only where the place the row draws is first.

A fuel figure waits for a lap, everywhere it is drawn. In the pit box band D read PER LAP 0.000 and LAST LAP 0.000 beside EST. LAPS --, one tank with two fields saying they had no reading and two saying the car had burned nothing, because only the estimate waited for a completed lap. The four now wait together, the last lap's consumption also for a lap that cost something, since SimHub publishes zero for a lap that included a stop; the fuel page, the fuel-laps card and the lap review's fuel used wait with them; and the fuel page's low-fuel red no longer paints a full tank at an idle screen, where the unpublished estimate read as zero and zero is under a lap.

The panel talks to a driver. Roughly ninety-five strings across the four tabs were rewritten on one pattern: the reasoning behind a control goes, the mechanism goes, the project's own vocabulary goes, and what the reader has to act on stays. A third of the rows carry no caption at all, and the labels read as a specification sheet writes them: Centre display, Idle display, Mounting side, Rev light style, Flag display. The rules are written down in docs/design/voice.md.

Added

• Band D's relative follows the class filter. Its page is three gaps rather than a list, so "My class only" there asks for the car ahead and the car behind in your own class, which on a multi-class grid is often not the car ahead on track. The panel offers the switch on the band strip, beside the ones zones B and C already carry, and the band reads the class-only cars whenever the switch or the rig's class mode says so.
• The plugin's entry in SimHub's left menu carries the logo, which it did not before, and the mark itself is redrawn as the face's own layout: a strip top and bottom with three zones between them, the middle one wider because the gear is. The needle went because, five rows under SimHub's own Dash Studio entry, a gauge with a needle read as a second copy of a neighbour.

Changed

• The name is OpenDash, with a capital O, everywhere the product writes it: the dashboard titles in Dash Studio, the folders under DashTemplates, the LED profiles and their author, and the plugin's own strings. On Windows the folders are the same folders, since the file system does not distinguish the case, so an installed rig updates in place. The font family stays openDash Display, being a key rather than a word.
• A matrix panel's Idle display is the one control over what it shows at rest. It had two, Idle display choosing Dark or Gear and a Show the gear switch, and the profile gated the gear on both, so with the display on Dark the switch decided nothing and with it on Gear the switch decided alone. The switch's row is gone; a panel whose switch was off comes back set to Dark, and FlagBoxMatrix<N>Gear stays attached as the alias, so that a dashboard written against it still reads.

Fixed

• A leaderboard in class mode numbered rows it had not filtered. See above.
• Band D's fuel page said 0.000 beside --. See above; it is the reading the review started from.
• The fuel page painted a full tank red before the first lap, and the lap review reported a lap that cost nothing before any lap had been driven.

Development

• Binding an item adds to what it already binds. withBindings, whose spread over an element replaced every binding the element had built for itself, is gone, and withMoreBindings folds new targets in and throws on a target bound in two places. Fifty-three call sites moved and every built package is byte-identical, so nothing on a screen changes.

Two things the plugin used to do on its own, and now asks about first. One of them was reported as broken and was not; the other could not be told apart from broken by anybody looking at it.

The car light tables arrive when you press the button, and at no other moment. They used to come down on their own: fetched at startup, refetched once a week had passed, governed by the update-check switch, with the reasoning about what leaves the machine living in a source comment. A driver never chose it and was never told it had happened. The Lights tab now carries a row for it -- what the tables are, who measured them, that the request is for every car at once so the car you are in is not disclosed, that it is about 400 KB, and what the licence is -- with a button that reads Download until there are tables and Update afterwards. Starting SimHub makes no request whatever the settings say.

Two reasons for the press. A driver whose lights looked generic had nothing to read and nothing to press, because car is the default style and its fallback is deliberately silent: the plugin absent, no table fetched, no entry for the car and a driver who chose another style all looked the same. And a copy you made, having been shown the project and the licence, is a better answer to CC BY-NC-SA than one a background thread made during startup. OpenDash redistributes nothing either way, which was always the load-bearing fact, but the position is stronger for the press.

The update asks you to close SimHub, because that is when it happens. It was reported as the update not working, and it worked: the assembly was staged, the waiter was armed, and the swap happened correctly the next time SimHub closed. What did not happen was anybody being told. The whole of what said so was a caption at the foot of a long tab, in the past tense, underneath a pill that had already flipped to "up to date" and a version number that had already moved to the new release. Every visible thing said done, so the one step that still had to happen was not asked for and nobody took it, and the next session ran the old plugin against the new dashboards -- which is the exact failure the self-update exists to prevent.

Added

• A car light tables row on the Lights tab: what the tables are, who measured them, that the request covers every car at once, the size of it, and the licence, with a button that says Download while the folder is empty and Update once it is not. A copy more than a week old is mentioned beside the button and refetched only if you press it.
• A restart dialog when an update is staged, which is SimHub's own: a program cannot replace its own code while it is running, close SimHub now and start it again? Yes shuts SimHub down -- a shutdown rather than a close of the main window, because SimHub can be set to go to the tray and a driver who just said yes would watch it minimise -- and it comes back on the new assembly. No leaves everything as it was.

Changed

• Starting SimHub fetches nothing. The update-check setting governs plugin updates and no longer governs the car light tables at all, which are now a press and only a press.
• The plugin section says a swap is waiting every time it is drawn, rather than only in the moment the download finished, so a restart you postponed is still asked for when you next open the tab.
• The empty tables folder describes itself, which is the state every fresh install now sits in.

Fixed

• An update that had been applied stopped reading as one that had not. See above; it is the reason this candidate exists.

The second candidate cut from rig testing, and the one to have if your LEDs are in your wheel.

An LED profile now goes to the device you say, because there is no shared list to go to. SimHub keeps one profile list per LED device, in that device's own file, and a profile in one is invisible in every other. OpenDash installed into the Arduino RGB LEDs device whatever the strip was, so a bar added for a wheel was parsed, added, saved and verified correctly -- into a list the wheel does not read. Every part of the install worked; what was wrong was upstream of it. A bar now names its device and the panel asks: one device on the rig and it simply says where the profile went, several and it is a drop-down, none and it says what to add in SimHub first. A bar you already have reads as the Arduino's, because that is where it actually went.

The pit wall's flag left the header and became the page's. It was a colour block and a word in the corner of a 1920 px strip, built from the six flags SimHub normalises out of the fifteen the face knows -- so it stayed dark under a red flag or a full-course caution, which are the two it was most wanted for. It is now the companion's three-way setting, off / bar / full screen, drawn from the full catalogue, with the bar directly under the header and the full flag over the body.

Tapping a companion changes the module. SimHub's only touch gesture walks the screens whose expression is true, and OpenDash was leaving exactly one of the twenty-one enabled, so a tap had nowhere to go. SimHub owns the paging now, which also makes its own per-dashboard "Next screen" work on a wheel button.

Every stroke of a matrix digit is two LEDs thick. The uprights were two columns wide and the crossbars one row tall, so a 3 was three hairlines between two solid stems and the digits read as though they were coming apart.

Added

• A "Which device" row on every LED bar, and on the add-a-bar page. Moving a bar reinstalls its profile on the device you chose and takes the old copy out of every other, so nothing is left behind reading properties that now drive something else.
• A pit wall flag setting: off, a bar under the header, or the body. band is the default, where a companion's is full -- a pit wall is a board, a track map and four zones that somebody is watching because of the flag, so covering them at the moment a yellow comes out hides the cars the yellow is about.
• "Opens on" is back on the companion. SimHub moves off a screen that stops being enabled, so leaving one module enabled for a few seconds after SimHub loads still selects it; OpenDash just cannot do that on every frame without breaking the tap. The held glance needs the same trick twice and does not come back yet; see #362.

Changed

• Add a screen opens on 850 x 480, which is what most screens running OpenDash are, rather than on whichever size came first in the catalogue.
• The pit wall's two clocks name themselves first, as every other group on the strip does. They were the one group written the other way round -- 14:32 LOCAL 15:07 SIM -- so which was the wall clock and which the sim's was a rule you had to know, and the two pairs sat a word apart where everything else sits a group gap apart.
• The 4 on a matrix panel is two stems and a crossbar, rather than a bar hung off a diagonal.

Fixed

• A profile added for a wheel reaches the wheel. See above; it is the headline of this release.
• Pages fill the box they are given. A row that cannot grow used to veto growth for the whole page, which caught fuel's level bar, the speedo's rev well, pit view's progress bar and the energy page's gauge along with the drawings the rule was written for. Those four never grew at any size. Fuel at the 850 x 480 zone goes from 46 px numerals to 60, and from 170 of its 250 pixels to 216.
• A field that read a class or a car went blank rather than drawing. A SimHub function that throws draws the empty string and logs nothing, so left([Class], 4) on a car without a class emptied its field for ever. Every package is now checked against the functions that can throw.
• Sectors stop blinking on the second lap. The best-lap opponent's position came through a SimHub function whose argument chain can be momentarily null while the data is rewritten, and a throw on one frame draws nothing on that frame. It reads the published property instead.
• A car the sim has not placed draws nothing, not P0. A grid of AI before the green flag drew a column of zeroes.
• A car number waits until there is one. iRacing hands back -1 for a car it has not placed, so a field of AI drew #-1 down the number column until their first lap.

The candidate that was tested on a real rig rather than on the VM, which is why most of what follows is a correction. Three of them are the same mistake in different places: a reading that was right about the property it read and wrong about the question it was answering.

A light profile you add now appears in SimHub. SimHub's AddProfile writes to AvailableProfiles, which is not a collection but a computed property: it is the saved list normally, and the device maker's built-in list whenever the device ships built-in profiles and you have them switched on. A Fanatec wheel ships them. So on such a rig the profile was appended to the maker's list, never written to disk, and gone at the next start -- while OpenDash's own check, which reads the saved list, could not find it either and told you the install had failed. If you have a Fanatec wheel this is the release to have.

The Fanatec wiring order was right and its name was wrong. It shipped as "3/9/3 Fanalab", which is what it was read off, and it is nothing to do with Fanalab: it is the order SimHub's own Fanatec device presents, nine RevLEDs and then six FlagLEDs. Anyone driving a Fanatec wheel through SimHub read that caption, decided it was not for them, installed the plain 3/9/3 and got their revs across the middle of the wheel with half the flag LEDs lit. It is 3/9/3 Fanatec now, and the order is confirmed against a working profile from a rig with the wheel rather than inferred.

The Update button updates OpenDash itself. It replaced the dashboards and left the plugin alone, so pressing it gave you packages from the new release and a plugin from the old one -- and because a package's bindings are literals and the plugin is what attaches the properties behind them, the half that moved read names the half that did not had never heard of. That fails silently, as a field drawing its fallback for ever with nothing in any log.

The strip shapes are a grid. Sides of nought to four around a centre of four to twelve, every combination, plus bare runs to twenty-five. Sixty-two profiles from two ranges, instead of a table of product names that asked you to find your wheel in somebody else's list.

Added

• Every strip shape, generated. A / B / A for every side of 0-4 and every centre of 4-12, and the bare runs of 13-25 that cover the brows. What you know about your strip is how many LEDs it has and how they are grouped, and those two numbers are now the whole of what you are asked. The device-named shapes that fall outside the grid are kept, so nothing installed disappears.
• A car alongside can light the whole bar, per bar rather than per rig: a brow above a monitor has no ends to speak of and a rim does.
• OpenDash updates itself. The Update button now fetches the plugin as well as the dashboards. A loaded assembly cannot overwrite itself, so the new one is staged beside it and a detached process puts it in place once SimHub has closed, keeping the one it replaced. It is armed the moment the file is staged, so it survives a crash or a kill and not only a tidy shutdown.
• A pit wall zone belongs to a page, and each page has its own. Twelve settings where there were five, grouped in the panel under the page they belong to, and one setting chooses which of the three pages the wall shows.
• A companion chooses how it shows a flag: off, the bar at the foot, or over the module, which is the new default. A phone on a stand beside the wheel is not in your eyeline, so a twelve-pixel strip on it says nothing.
• The gear module carries the speed and the revs. On a face's zones, the companion and the pit wall alike. The gear is still sized first and still has the box to itself where there is no room for anything beside it.
• The stint says where you are in the race: the lap out of the estimated total as 12 / 43, how long the fuel lasts, and how long you have been out.

Changed

• The rev bar is on or off. "Shift lights" and "RPM bar" were offered as if they were tastes, and they are not: where OpenDash has a table for the car it draws that car's own lights, and where it has none it draws an RPM bar that ends in shift lights, which is what almost every car does. A stored "RPM bar" loads as the one behaviour; "off" still gives the strip's room back to the zones, which is what a wheel with LEDs of its own wants.
• The settings panel fills the window it is given, between 640 and 1200 pixels wide, rather than drawing one fixed column.
• The car settings page dropped the car's model and number, and the stint page dropped the driver's name and number. They are the one thing on those pages that cannot change while you drive and that you already know. The row they took is a row the settings grid now has: the two narrowest zones draw all six setting cells where they used to shed three.
• A pit wall's page is set in the plugin and stays there. The three pages are configuration rather than something to page through mid-session.

Fixed

• A light profile you add is saved and appears on your device. The install wrote to the wrong list on any device with built-in profiles switched on. Where that switch is on, the panel now says so rather than leaving you hunting for a profile SimHub will not list.
• The Fanatec 3/9/3 is named for what it is. The profile for a Fanatec wheel driven through SimHub was captioned for Fanalab, so the one arrangement that works was the one a Fanatec owner skipped.
• Changing one pit wall zone no longer changes another. The race page's zones and the telemetry page's were the same settings, so pointing one somewhere moved the other with it, and the panel gave no sign.
• Fuel figures wait for a completed lap. Before the first crossing SimHub extrapolates the partial lap, so the per-lap average, the estimated laps, the refuel and the fuel time all moved every frame. They read nothing until there is a lap to average.
• TC and ABS appear for a car whose systems are not adjustable. The page tested the driver-adjustable control, which is a narrower question than whether the car has the system, so a car with fixed traction control showed no TC cell at all.
• The plugin's own status no longer reads "not installed" on a healthy rig. It was the worst of every package OpenDash embeds, and since a screen is something you add, the sizes nobody added are never written. It reads your rig now.
• An update is offered again when the plugin is behind its dashboards. The check read only the dashboards' version, so the state every machine is in between staging a new plugin and restarting reported itself as up to date.
• A one-LED side, a bare run and a short side each light correctly. The grid exposed three gaps: three lamps competed for a single LED, a bare run had no spotter at all because the spotter lived on the sides, and effects that look identical on a short side were drawn one over another.
• The build no longer ships what it has stopped making. A renamed or removed profile stayed in the output directory and was packed into the release; 0.3.0-rc.2 carries a Fanalab profile no source builds.

The candidate that puts the zones back on the screen. In 0.3.0-rc.1 a single corner radius was computed as 3.5999999999999996 and written into a field SimHub reads as an integer, and because SimHub refuses the whole file rather than that one number, every screen made of the module sub-dashboard drew nothing at all: zone B, zone C, both companions and every zone of every pit wall. Nothing reached the log, which is why the rest of the face drew normally around an empty middle. If you installed rc.1, this is the release to replace it with.

Besides that, the rig model finishes the move the screens began. An RGB strip is something you add and name, with the settings its own profile reads, rather than a shape the whole rig answers for at once, and a flag box panel is an instance in the same way. Moreover, the rev bar became a per-screen answer, so a rim whose wheel already carries LEDs across its top and a display on the desk beside it are no longer switched off together. A rig therefore starts with no strips and no panels, while a settings file written against rc.1 keeps whatever was doing something in it.

Two of the readings below were simply wrong before the sim had measured a lap, and both concern fuel: on an idle screen the tank read as low in five places at once, and band D estimated zero laps remaining rather than saying that it had no estimate.

Added

• An LED bar is a strip you added, with settings of its own. A bar has a name, a shape and a namespace frozen at creation, the way a screen does (ADR 0017): adding one installs a profile of that name into SimHub, and that profile is the embedded one with the bar's namespace written through its three settings, so a wheel and a brow on one rig can finally be told to show different things in their middles, to fill their ladders differently and to animate a flag or to hold it. Removing the bar takes the profile back out. What is the rig's stays the rig's, which is brightness, night mode, the low-fuel threshold and the car's own shift pattern. A rig starts with no bars, because a profile paints hardware somebody owns and OpenDash does not guess at what that is (ADR 0013).
• A matrix panel is an instance as well. Four numbered groups of eleven settings, one of them switched on because it happened to be first, is a page for hardware most people own none of. Add one, give it the name you will recognise it by, and it arrives working. A settings file written before this keeps every slot that was doing something, which on the shipped defaults is matrix 1 alone, so nobody's box goes dark because the model under it changed.
• The rev bar is per screen. OpenDash.<Face>RevBar falls back to the rig-wide OpenDash.RevBar, which still falls back to the deprecated ShiftLights, so a settings file written before this keeps drawing what its owner chose until they answer one face individually. The row moved from the Data tab onto each face's own pane, above the flag format; the card faces own no properties at all, so theirs keeps writing the rig-wide name and says so where it is drawn.
• A screen can change size without being removed and added again, which had been throwing away its zones and every wheel button bound to it. The namespace is frozen through a resize as it is through a rename, so the settings and the bindings survive and only the folder is rewritten.
• A 4/8/4 wheel, being sides of four around a centre of eight. The table carried 4/9/4 and 4/14/4 either side of it and nothing at eight, so a wheel of that geometry had to borrow a profile that paints one LED it does not have. Twenty-two profiles are built now, being twenty-one shapes and the flag box.
• The redline flash on the flag box is a switch per panel. FlagBoxMatrix<N>GearBlink is on by default, and turning it off leaves the digit in its redline colour, so nothing is lost but the strobe. The flash is the box repeating what the rev bar and the strip have already said twice, which is worth answering for one box and not for another, for the reason every other flag box setting became per panel.

Changed

• Adding a screen asks what it is first. It had been one drop-down of every package the build carries, reading "480 × 850 · companion", which is two questions at once in a vocabulary a driver has no reason to know. The question now is what kind of screen, then how big only where there is a choice, and for the companion and the pit wall that second question is which way round rather than a resolution. Every kind says in one line what it is, and the name box opens on something recognisable.
• The gear fills the flag box panel. The digit was a 5 by 7 glyph dropped into the corner of the 8 by 8 grid, with one column of margin on the left, two on the right and the bottom row dark, so it read as small and off-centre beside a flag that filled the panel, and a driver counted the row and the column that never lit. The font is redrawn on the whole panel with two-pixel strokes, and 6, 8 and 9 are one family with one stroke between them, which is the only difference that survives sixty pixels read in peripheral vision.
• The Install tab is a census rather than a place to install. Its strip rows say which shapes this build draws for, and whether anything of ours is in SimHub for them; its package rows lose their Add, a screen not being a package, and a row that knows only the package could offer neither a name nor a size. Installing happens where the screen or the bar is.
• The shape list opens on a wheel rather than on "0/10/0", which is a bare run nobody owns: it was sorted by id where the canvas's own row order opens on the wheels. The name box opens on a name of ours in the same way, so the row it installs into SimHub's LED profile list reads as OpenDash's rather than as a bare geometry among everybody else's profiles.

Fixed

• Every module page drew nothing. JsonTextReader.ReadAsInt32 throws on "3.5999999999999996" rather than truncating it, and the throw unwinds EditorModel.LoadFromFile, so one BorderStyle.RadiusTopLeft computed as 0.2 × 18 cost the whole file. In 0.3.0-rc.1 that file was the module sub-dashboard, which is what zone B, zone C, both companions and every pit wall zone are made of. The serialiser now rounds all eight of BorderStyle's numbers, which are int in SimHub, and intFields.ts is the backstop for the fields nothing rounds: the public integer properties of every GraphicalDash class, read out of the decompiled 9.12.6 assembly, at which a document holding a fraction is refused outright and every composed package is checked, so this cannot reach a driver again.
• A tank was low before the sim knew what a lap costs. SimHub publishes Fuel_RemainingLaps as zero rather than null before a lap has been run, so "under the threshold" was true at every idle screen, and one sentence feeds five drawings: the band's fuel telltale, the fuel pop-up, the flag box's low-fuel warning, the strip's low-fuel state and the zone telltale, every one of them lit while nothing was running. tankIsLow now asks for a per-lap consumption first, which is the gate the fuel module already draws its own estimate behind.
• Band D estimated zero laps beside a tank the sim had not measured, which is a reading with nobody behind it stated with the confidence of a number. It says it has no estimate instead, behind that same consumption gate.
• The class filter drew as a white disc over most of zone B and zone C. SimHub's SHToggleButton declares no size of its own and grows to whatever it is measured against, and this one was docked to the bottom of a cell as tall as the face's body, where every other switch on the panel sits in a row of automatic height. It is measured inside a vertical stack now, which asks the same question the rows ask.
• Two screens could own one DashTemplates folder, so removing one deleted the other's dashboard.
• The mirror was computed only when one setting asked for it, so a second bar set to the car's own pattern would have read a run that nothing filled. Anything on the rig asking for it is sufficient now.
• The line after adding a screen named the folder, whereas SimHub lists a dashboard under its title, which is the name the driver has just chosen. The two remove links read "Remove", the longer words having been cut off at the panel's edge once a group was indented inside its section.

The candidate that finishes the zone face. The whole design canvas was measured against the build, requirement by requirement, and the differences were closed: band D now cycles its eight pages, zone A its four, and zones B and C the full catalogue of twenty-one, each page drawn at the size its own artboard gives it rather than at one size for every face. A flag can now take the whole body of the screen instead of the band alone, and whichever format you choose it names all fifteen conditions the catalogue holds, where it previously knew six. Besides the face, the flag box gained its own settings per panel, the strips gained a wiring order for Fanatec wheels driven through Fanalab, and the companion pages itself rather than borrowing SimHub's own ring.

Several of the corrections below are readings that were simply wrong, and had been wrong for some time. If you race in a multi-class field, if you drive an imperial rig, or if you rely on the spotter, it would be worth reading the Fixed section before anything else.

The version moves to 0.3.0 rather than to a third 0.2 candidate because of how much of the settings surface this adds: twelve further properties, a flag format and a lap review that a screen owns individually, a filter and a page-on-demand that a pit wall owns, four settings that moved from the Lights tab into each flag box panel's own group, and a twenty-first LED profile. A settings file written against 0.2.0-rc.2 is migrated rather than discarded, so nothing is lost by upgrading, but the surface is wide enough that it is not the same minor version.

Added

• A flag can take the whole screen. OpenDash.<Face>FlagFormat chooses between the band and a full-screen block over zones B, A and C, and it is a per-screen setting offered on that screen's own pane, so a rim and a main dash in one rig may answer differently. The block is derived from the layout rather than tabulated, which is why it is drawn correctly at all eight sizes and in both rev-bar arrangements.
• Fifteen flag conditions rather than six, on band D and on the full-screen block alike, ranked in the catalogue's own order and reading the same expression in both places. A red flag or a full-course caution therefore draws something, where the full-screen format had previously left the body blank while the band named the condition.
• A lap review after each crossing, off by default. It is the largest of the boxes drawn over zone A and covers the lap-time pop-up while it is out, and it never covers band D, the rev bar, the bar of settled values or the pit limiter banner.
• Change notifications: a setting you turn on the wheel is announced for three seconds, with the direction it moved, for the seven values the sim actually publishes.
• Five pit alerts in the limiter's own rectangle, being engage, disengage, the limiter on in the lane, the ignition off and the engine off. They are ranked among themselves rather than against the flag, so a caution does not blank the limiter band at the moment the pit lane is busiest.
• Blue flag detail: the band may name the class of the car behind, or that car's position and class, as a rig setting on the Data tab.
• The flag box settles per panel. The critical-flags switch, the gear, and the oil and water temperatures moved from the tab header into each matrix's own group, so somebody running one box on flags and another on the gear answers each separately. A settings file written before the move is migrated into all four panels once.
• The spotter is an overlay on the flag box rather than a state that displaces everything under it, so a car alongside no longer blanks the warnings or the gear, and its bar can be made to grow in three steps as the car closes.
• A Fanalab wiring order for the 3/9/3 wheel, shipped as a profile of its own so that the plain 3/9/3 keeps working for the Simucube, Cammus and Moza wheels of the same geometry. Twenty-one profiles are now built and installable from the Install tab.
• The companion pages itself. Each of its twenty-one screens is enabled by the module switch and the page property together, which gives it a module to open on, a module a held button shows, and a next-module binding that skips what you have turned off.
• A pit wall lists by class on its own setting, and lends a zone a page on demand while a button is held, giving that zone its own page back on release.

Changed

• Labels are 15 px on a face and 13 px on the pit wall, which is what every sheet draws. The row they sit in stays 13 px in both cases, so nothing else moved and no page sheds a field for it.
• Zone A's cluster is cut from its column rather than capped, the speed reads the unit the driver has chosen rather than always metric, and an eight-speed car no longer ghosts a ninth gear.
• The oil and fuel warnings on the flag box are the telltales ISO 2575 registers, an oil can and a fuel pump, in place of a disc that shared the meatball's silhouette and a tank outline that shared the limiter frame's. Nothing below the flags blinks any more, blinking being the flag layer's own vocabulary for a waved yellow.
• The round faces draw a chequered ring at the density their artboards state, which is 46 checks at 480 and 78 at 800, in place of a constant 24.

Fixed

• The class position read the size of the class. In a multi-class field the bar showed how many cars were in your class rather than where you were in it.
• The spotter lamp was lit permanently, because the two sides were combined in a way that was true whenever either property was present rather than when either reported a car.
• The five-lap average left out the newest lap, so it was always one lap behind.
• Zone A's speed and its unit disagreed on an imperial rig: the value was always metric while the label beside it followed the driver's own setting.
• A four-digit car number was drawn underneath the class chip on the companion, the row having advanced by a fixed cell narrower than the number itself.
• A bound unit was measured on its design-time text, so a driver on a gallons profile lost the last glyph of GAL. A bound unit that declares no widest string is now refused outright.
• The companion drew its flag band at 32 px where all three of its sheets draw 12, which had been quietly shedding the three sector readings from the landscape lap times page.
• The flag box showed nothing at all on a sim that publishes no ignition state, neither of its two branches being satisfied.
• The narrow delta page lost its bar, which every one of the catalogue's four drawings carries.

Development

• global.json pins the .NET SDK and LangVersion is a version rather than latest, so a local build and the runner read the same source the same way. The two together close a defect that had been fixed three times: on a newer compiler array.Reverse() binds to the in-place span overload rather than to LINQ, which compiles on one machine and not on the other. A test now holds the C# surface to the unambiguous spelling.
• The pre-commit hook moved to .githooks/ so that it is reviewed like anything else, and it now refuses one of the author's drafts only while a draft of it is genuinely open somewhere, rather than refusing four paths for ever. Adopt it with git config core.hooksPath .githooks.

The candidate that lights the hardware around the screen, and that asks the car itself where its shift point is rather than deriving one from the redline. Nineteen profiles for RGB strips and brows are built beside the flag box's and published with this release, the rev bar can be switched off entirely on a rig whose wheel already carries LEDs, and the bar, the arc and the companion's speedo light at the four RPMs your sim publishes for the car you are driving. Besides the lights, the pages inside the zones grow to fill the box they are given, so a narrow face no longer draws a small table under a large empty space.

If you are on 0.1.0-rc.3, this is the first release the Update button has to offer you: 0.1.0-rc.4 and 0.2.0-rc.1 were prepared but neither was ever published, so the two sections beneath this one describe changes that reach you here as well. The 0.2.0-rc.1 section is the one to read first, because it replaces your dashboard with a different design rather than with a newer version of the same one, and it says what happens to the face you have installed.

Added

• An RGB strip mirrors the shift lights of the car you are driving — its LEDs, its colours, the order they light in, and how fast it flashes, in the gear you are in. A Porsche Cup fills from both ends inwards, a Next Gen stock car runs green to amber to red, a W13 finishes on a block of five blue, and none of that is a setting: it is the car. Rev style is a drop-down now, with The car's own as the default and OpenDash's three looks — left to right, meet in middle, F1 — beside it for anyone who would rather have one look in every car.
• iRacing publishes no part of this. It publishes four RPMs per car and nothing about colour, order, LED count or the gear, so the pattern comes from a measured table: the open Lovely Car Data project, by Lovely Sim Racing, ATSR and Gomez Sim Industries, under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. OpenDash ships none of it and fetches it once, as one archive of every car rather than one car at a time, so nothing about which car you are driving leaves your machine. Everything after that works offline. Turning update checks off turns this off too.
• A car with no table, a rig with no plugin, or a driver who prefers one of the three looks all get exactly what they got before: the ladder iRacing publishes for the car, or SimHub's bands for a car that publishes none. Nothing is lost by the mirror being unavailable.
• Car bar size decides what happens when the car's bar and your strip are different lengths: fill the strip, or draw the bar at its own length in the middle of it. A bar that fills from both ends still does at any strip length.
• ADR 0018 records the four standing refusals this moved, including the one that said the plugin does not compute.
• The rev bar can be turned off entirely, for a wheel or DDU that already has LEDs across its top. OpenDash.RevBar carries the three states — shift, rpm, off — and the General row in the plugin panel is now a three-way choice rather than a toggle. OpenDash.ShiftLights stays attached as its deprecated alias for a release, so a settings file and a dashboard written before the mode existed both still say what their owner meant.
• With the rev bar off, a rectangular zone face draws a second arrangement rather than a hole where the well was: the bar rises to the top margin and the zones take the room back, which is 44 rows of 480 on the reference face and a ninth of the nano. Both arrangements are built into the same package as two screens, so the setting changes the face in front of the driver with no reinstall. Their rectangles are derived rather than drawn and docs/design/zones.md §10 records what the canvas owes.
• The shift lights are the car's own. The bar, the arc and the companion's speedo now light at the four RPMs your sim publishes for the car you are driving, rather than at SimHub's idea of them. Shift reaches the bar for the first time: the point at which the sim is actually telling you to shift had no equivalent in the old model, whose two bands were both derived from the redline. A car released this morning is right with nothing to set up and no table to wait for. For a car that publishes no ladder, and for any sim but iRacing, the bar falls back to the bands you tune on SimHub's Car Settings page and looks exactly as it did. Nothing is configured either way: the bar asks the car, every frame. In the last gear the top band stays lit but stops flashing, because a flash asking for a shift there is an instruction that cannot be followed. The gear on the flag box is coloured and flashed by the same model, down to that last-gear exception, so a digit, a rev segment and an LED on a strip change colour and begin flashing on the same frame for the same reason. ADR 0014 is the whole of the reasoning, including why OpenDash mirrors thresholds and never colour.
• Which ladder your car is on is visible. The shift state is drawn as two layers, revBar.shiftLights and revBar.shiftLightsSimHub, and whichever is visible in Dash Studio is the one in use, so a car that lights oddly can be diagnosed without reading an expression. The plain RPM bar is the third layer and is unchanged; off is still not a layer. Nothing moved on the face and no setting gained a value.
• OpenDash lights RGB strips as well as the flag box. The build now writes a .ledsprofile for nineteen strip shapes beside the flag box's — wheel rims from 3/9/3 to 5/10/5, bare runs of eight to sixteen, and brows of nine to twenty-five — and every release carries them. Import one through SimHub's own LED profile import and pick it on your device; a strip wired from the far end has a profile of its own rather than needing rewiring. The rev ladder on a strip is built from the same expressions the rev bar is, so a strip and a screen in one rig cannot disagree about when a light comes on. The sides carry brake, and the run carries the flags, the pit states, a car alongside, ABS and traction control, DRS, low fuel and the temperature warnings, ranked the way the face ranks them.
• Two settings for the strips, in the plugin panel's Lights section. Strip centre chooses what the middle of the run shows: revs, revs with the sides left dark, brake, throttle and brake from the middle out, or fuel. Rev style chooses how the ladder fills: left to right, meeting in the middle, or the F1 look that flashes the whole bar. A style never changes when a light comes on, only which LED takes which rung and what colour it is, so your car's own shift points survive whichever look you pick.
• A car whose shift point moves with the gear can be given a table. data/shift-points.json overrides the published ladder for a named car, gear by gear, and a gear left out of an entry falls back to what the sim publishes for the car as a whole. It ships empty, which is deliberate rather than unfinished: OpenDash does not carry measurements it has not made, and an invented number puts a shift light in the wrong place with total confidence. What ships is the mechanism, its validator and the rules for contributing an entry, so a car somebody has actually measured can arrive as a reviewable pull request. A car that is not in the table gets the ladder iRacing publishes for it, which is right for most cars.

Changed

• A page fills the zone it is given. A page's type grows one step of its density ramp at a time until it meets the height of its box, the width of its box or the top of the ramp, and it is refused a step that would leave it in a more ragged wrap than it started in. Zone B of the 850 x 480 face drew two 34 px lap times across the top of it with most of the zone empty underneath, which the README capture showed plainly; that page now stacks and fills. Three pages moved and eighteen stayed where they were, and docs/design/readability-pass.md records the reason for each one that stayed.
• The car settings strip is drawn at the size of the bar's other values. Slip, TC, bias and ABS were measured and drawn at the size of their own uppercase labels, and dimmed besides, which left them small and faint between RACE, LAP, POSITION and CLASS at 34 px. The canvas had said 34 px on the 1280 and 28 px on the 850 from the start, and the build now agrees with it. One consequence is visible on the two narrowest faces: brake bias needs 58 px where it needed 30, so the 850 x 480 keeps TC and bias where it used to keep ABS as well, and the 800 x 480 keeps bias alone.
• Every release carries manifest.json, which lists the packages and the LED profiles it published with the size, the slot count and the rung of each. It carries a schemaVersion of its own, so a reader meeting one out in the world can tell which shape it is reading.

Known

• No profile OpenDash generates has yet been imported into a real SimHub, and no strip, brow or matrix has been lit by one. They are generated against the format read out of the decompiled 9.12.6 assemblies, their pictures are checked by tests and the whole catalogue can be driven in the emulator, so for the moment "it parses" is a claim about Json.NET rather than about SimHub. If you own any of this hardware, saying what it actually does is the most useful thing you could report.

The candidate that replaces your dashboard with a different one rather than a newer version. The twelve-slot face becomes the zone face rc.3 published for review: a rev bar, a bar of settled values, three zones across the body and a band along the foot, each zone holding one page at a time out of its own catalogue and advanced with a wheel button. If you are on 0.1.0-rc.4 this is the first release its Update button has to offer you, and pressing it changes what the dashboard is rather than what it says.

Your existing dashboard is copied before it is replaced. A face OpenDash wrote and you have not edited is zipped to DashTemplates/<name>_backup.zip, which the next install of the same folder reclaims, so move it elsewhere if you want to keep it. A face you have edited in Dash Studio is recognised and held back instead, and pressing Reinstall a second time is what replaces it; the copy taken then is kept under a name no later update reclaims. Either way, Restore puts one back. A folder installed by rc.3 or earlier carries no record of what OpenDash wrote, so an edit to it cannot be told from an untouched copy and nothing can ask you; there the zipped copy is the whole of the protection.

Nothing you have set is lost. A face's zones, bar and glance are stored against its screen size rather than against the package that carried the name, so a zone face configured in 0.1.0-rc.4 comes up configured, and what rc.3 carried comes up on the 1920 x 480 face. The twelve-slot faces are still built and published as OpenDash slots <size>.simhubdash, and installing one by hand puts the old face back under a name of its own, beside the new one rather than over it.

Changed

• The zone faces take the shipped names. OpenDash zones 1920x480 is now OpenDash and its seven rectangular siblings follow, so the face the plugin installs at each rectangular size is the zone face. The twelve-slot faces they replace are renamed OpenDash slots <size>. They are still built and still published, so that the two can be compared on a rig, but the plugin no longer embeds them and so no longer installs them. The two round faces are untouched and keep their names.
• The documents a user reads describe the zone face. README.md and plugin/INSTALL.md were written around twelve slots and are now written around the five parts, each zone's catalogue and the wheel button that cycles it, which is what this release installs, and docs/second-screens.md points at that face rather than at twelve slots. docs/architecture.md still describes the card path, because that path still builds; it carries a banner saying which of the two it is about, and is rewritten when the path is retired.

Added

• The flag box: OpenDash now lights an 8x8 LED matrix. A profile for the printed WS2812b box a lot of people have beside the screen, built by the same build as the dashboards and embedded in the same plugin. It shows the flag that is out, the pit state, a car alongside, low fuel, oil and water, and the gear underneath all of it — one picture at a time, ranked the way the face ranks the same conditions, coloured from the same tokens.

Installing it is one button. Open the OpenDash page, scroll to Lights, press Install into SimHub, then pick the profile on your matrix device. OpenDash adds it through SimHub's own matrix-profile API, so SimHub writes its own settings and nothing of yours is touched — OpenDash only ever recognises its own profile. It never installs on its own: a profile paints hardware you own, so it is asked about once rather than assumed.

When OpenDash updates, the button offers Update in SimHub. Updating replaces the copy in SimHub, including any changes you made to it there, so copy it under a new name first if you have customised it. The profile is also written to SimHub\OpenDash\OpenDash Flag box.ledsprofile, shown under the button, as the fallback when SimHub's matrix settings cannot be reached and as the thing you copy to a second machine.

Set the matrix's rotation and serpentine on the device in SimHub first. They belong to SimHub because the right values depend on which corner your data cable enters, and if they are wrong the picture comes out sideways and the profile looks broken. docs/flag-box.md is the guide; ADR 0013 is the reasoning.

• The Lights page, with brightness, a separate night brightness and a night switch for the whole rig, a critical-flags-only switch for drivers who want the box quiet until something matters, thresholds for the three warnings, and a settings group for each of SimHub's four matrix contents so that two boxes can do different jobs.

Known

• The round faces are still the twelve-slot design, because what a round face does with zones is not decided. They are the only face at their size, so a user who has one keeps getting one.
• No 8x8 matrix has ever been plugged into OpenDash's test machine. The flag box profile is generated against the format read out of SimHub's own assemblies, its pictures are checked by tests and rendered into build/flag-box.svg, and the whole catalogue can be driven in the emulator — but nobody has yet watched it run on a real panel. If you own one, saying what it actually does is the most useful thing you could report.
• The flag box draws iRacing only, and several things a comparable box draws are deliberately absent because iRacing does not publish them: sector yellows, a virtual safety car, a countdown to your pit box, and the fourth spotter state. Each is listed with its reason in the guide.

The candidate that can tell you it is out of date, and then fix that itself. OpenDash now asks GitHub once a day whether a newer release exists, says so in the plugin's Dashboard section, and replaces your installed dashboards with one click when you ask it to. Nothing about you is sent, it can be switched off, and switching it off means nothing is fetched at all rather than fetched and discarded.

The face itself is unchanged for anyone who has one installed. The zone faces are still built for review and still not installed, as in rc.3; they take the shipped names in 0.2.0-rc.1, which is the section above.

Added

• An update check. Once a day, the plugin asks GitHub what the newest release is and tells you in the Dashboard section. What is sent is a request carrying your IP address, which reaches GitHub and not us, and a User-Agent naming the product; that is the whole of it, and docs/decisions/0012-update-checks.md states it in full. There is a switch beside it.
• One click applies it. The Update button downloads what the release carries for the dashboards you actually have, checks each against the digest GitHub published, and installs them. Everything is in hand before anything on disk is touched, so a download that fails half way through leaves the machine as it was rather than half updated.
• Your work is not overwritten. A dashboard you have edited in Dash Studio is recognised and left alone, with a sentence saying so; pressing Reinstall a second time replaces it, and the copy taken then is kept under a name no later update reclaims. A dashboard OpenDash has never seen before is adopted as it is, because an edit made before OpenDash started watching cannot be told from an untouched folder.
• A Restore button, for putting back the copy an update kept.
• The generator can draw an image, which is what the telltales and the nationality flags will need. Nothing on a face draws one yet.

Changed

• Release notes are this file rather than a list of pull request titles, and a tag with no entry here fails the release rather than publishing empty notes.
• The settings panel says which screen it is configuring and draws that screen: the portrait face reads as a column, and the 800 x 286 no longer offers fields for a bar it does not have.
• Every screen keeps its own zones, bar and glance, and its own wheel actions. A rig with a face on the wheel and another beside it used to configure them together, so cycling zone C on one moved zone C on the other; each face now has its own settings, named for its size. What you set in rc.3 is carried over to the 1920 x 480 face.
• The car settings strip closes over a setting your car does not have, instead of leaving a hole where it would have been.
• The black flag covers band D, as the other five flags do. It used to be an outline you could read the page through.

Fixed

• Every package now carries `OFL.txt`, the licence of the Barlow typefaces it ships. Earlier releases shipped the fonts without it, which the licence does not permit. The plugin zip carries it too, and the release publishes it.
• The tenth release candidate is no longer reported as older than the second, which would have offered a user a downgrade.
• The Update button goes when the update is done, rather than staying on screen and doing nothing when pressed.
• Closing SimHub during an update no longer leaves a dashboard folder half replaced.
• On the 1280 faces, page D6 of band D drew its last field over the DRS lamp.

Known

• The eight zone faces are still for review and are not installed. They take the shipped names in 0.2.0-rc.1, and updating to that release replaces your face with a different design; it will say so beside the Update button, and the section above says what happens to the dashboard you have.
• README.md and plugin/INSTALL.md now describe the zone face, having been rewritten for 0.2.0-rc.1. On this release they are right about installing the plugin and wrong about the face it installs; the section above describes that face.

The candidate that fixes the font. Every numeral OpenDash draws has been drawn in the wrong face since the first build, and on this one it is right, so the whole dashboard looks narrower and better spaced than it did on rc.2. Alongside that, the plugin panel is rebuilt around the face rather than around a list, a wheel button can be bound without leaving the page, and eight zone faces are published for review.

Nothing a user has set is lost. The slot settings from rc.1 and rc.2 are still read, the zone settings are added beside them, and the plugin reinstalls the dashboards over an rc.2 copy as it did before.

Fixed

• The dashboard was never drawn in Barlow Condensed. WPF reads the width word out of a family name and files the condensed faces under "Barlow" as a stretch, so a request for "Barlow Condensed" reached a face about a fifth wider than the design, on the dash face, on both second screens and in the plugin's own settings panel. OpenDash now ships that face under a name carrying no width word, so nothing is folded. Every value is the width the layouts were measured for, and the gear on the 480 round face is back to the 260 the design asks for after having been cut to 228 to survive the wrong font.
• At 850 px wide the car settings strip was drawn over the bar's right-hand fields.
• A driver column sized to fit the name "Toma" was being called wide enough for a name.
• Zone C drew zone B's letter, the speed was centred within its own glyphs rather than its column, and the upper ghost gear was a "3" where it should not have been.

Added

• Every rectangular face is the same five parts: a rev bar, a bar of settled values, three zones across the body and a band along the foot. Each zone holds one page at a time out of its own catalogue, so a face is configured by choosing pages rather than by filling twelve slots. Eight of these are published here as OpenDash zones <size>.simhubdash for anyone who wants to look at one. They are not installed by the plugin and do not replace anything: the face you have stays the face you have until they take the shipped names.
• A wheel button can be bound from the panel. Five actions: one that advances each zone to its next enabled page, and one held for a glance, which shows a chosen page while the button is down and returns to the previous one when it is released.
• The settings panel draws a plan of the face, with each zone in its place, rather than a list of zone names.

Changed

• The panel's Dashboard section, its fonts and its wordmark are drawn in the corrected face, as the dashboards are.
• docs/decisions/0012-update-checks.md records what an update check would send and how it is switched off, and docs/scope.md moves the refusal it supersedes. Nothing fetches anything yet; the record is the gate the code has to pass through.

Known

• The eight zone faces are for review. A plugin that installed one would put a half-finished face into a dashboard list nobody asked to change, so the plugin embeds the fourteen card faces only.

No dashboard and no plugin logic changed since rc.1. The packages are the same drawings at a new version string, and this candidate is the development loop and the install instructions around them. The version is embedded in each package, so the plugin will still reinstall the dashboards over an rc.1 copy.

Added

• bun run emulator starts the synthetic iRacing telemetry emulator against the test VM, so cards can be seen with moving values without a copy of iRacing.
• bun run dev brings the whole rig up in one command: it builds the packages, deploys them to the VM, starts SimHub and the emulator, and leaves a screenshot in build/dev.png. docs/dev-loop.md describes the loop and what to do when a step stalls.
• media/ holds the screenshots that pull requests point at, with a README saying what belongs there.

Changed

• The README's install section now says that OpenDash-plugin.zip is the only file most people need, since all fourteen dashboards are embedded in it. It also says which folder OpenDash.dll goes in, and why unblocking the file matters: Windows marks a downloaded DLL, .NET then refuses to load it, and SimHub either reports a loading error or never mentions the plugin at all.
• docs/testing-vm.md and CLAUDE.md describe the new scripts rather than the manual steps they replace.

The first pre-release, and the first build that installs itself.

Added

• Fourteen packages built from TypeScript and design/tokens.json: ten dash sizes from 1920x480 down to two round faces, two companion screens and two pit wall screens, in landscape and portrait. Every card is a function from a slot rectangle to items, so one module description serves every size.
• Twenty-one companion modules and four pit wall zones, each of which shrinks or drops a field rather than drawing outside the box it was given.
• The SimHub plugin, which extracts the embedded dashboards on load, adds an "OpenDash" page to SimHub's left menu, and exposes each slot and mode as an OpenDash.* property. It compares the embedded version against the installed one to decide whether to reinstall.
• packages/generator, a typed model of SimHub's scene graph with the NCalc helpers, the serialiser, the validator and the package writer. It knows nothing about OpenDash.
• Text fitting as a test rather than a hope. SimHub hands every text box to WPF, which silently clips whatever does not fit, so every text of every package is measured against its box using advances read from the bundled fonts.
• CI that builds and tests the dashboards and the plugin on every push, and a release workflow that publishes both on a tag.
• bun run vm drives the test VM and its SimHub, and tools/irsdk-emulator feeds it scripted iRacing telemetry.