MRUI — Modular Robotic User Interface
MRUI is a private development project: a modular companion UI for robotics prototypes. Its purpose is to make a robot’s system state visible in real time—sensing, actuation, power supply, and state machines—so commissioning, tuning, and troubleshooting become significantly faster.
What MRUI is built for
Robotic systems consist of many subsystems running in parallel—sensors, motors, controllers, power paths, and state logic. When something “feels off”, logging alone often isn’t enough; you need live telemetry and a clear view of state transitions, thresholds, and trends. MRUI is designed to be that observation and diagnostic interface.
Architectural principle: toolkit instead of monolith
MRUI is intentionally built as a framework, not a one-off dashboard. Depending on the robotics setup, the right modules can be assembled:
Signal widgets: value readouts, gauges, ring widgets, trend charts
State/mode views: FSM states, transition events, failure modes
Actuator views: motors/servos (target vs. actual, duty cycle, direction, limits)
Power/health: voltage, current (optional), brownout events, warning thresholds
Debug/logs: events, parsing errors, packet loss, timeouts
The goal is for the UI to grow with the system: add new sensors or modules → register new widgets, without having to rebuild everything.
Data path: telemetry as a “signal bus”
MRUI reads robot data as a telemetry stream (e.g., via serial). At its core is a robust data pipeline:
parser → signal store (current values)
history buffer (time series)
event bus (state changes/alerts)
This makes short-lived spikes just as visible as slow drift (e.g., a voltage drop under load).
“Sensor-near” signal visualisation
Sensor values aren’t displayed generically, but in ways that match the signal type:
A potentiometer is faster to interpret as a circular gauge than as a number; distance sensors benefit from bar/range views; states and thresholds need clear colour/shape codes and warning logic. This makes debugging less about guessing and more about reading.
Current focus: Energy Monitoring System (EMS)
A current MRUI module is an Energy Monitoring System (EMS) for drive and power supply. It visualises voltage over time, load states, and threshold violations to make typical robotics issues visible (e.g., brownouts, unstable power delivery, or performance drops when motors start).
Why this matters in robotics
MRUI is my tool for developing robotic systems in a systematic way:
observe → form a hypothesis → adjust → test → compare.
This makes iteration faster, failures easier to localise, and architectural decisions (modularity, coupling, boundaries) measurable rather than based on gut feeling.
The image shows a collection of modular MRUI widget designs for visualising robotics telemetry and sensor data. The minimalist components are designed for fast real-time readability and cover a range of visual formats (e.g., trends, peaks, distributions, status indicators, and threshold displays). The overview serves as a toolkit: depending on the hardware setup, suitable widgets can be combined to make system states understandable at a glance and to simplify diagnosis and comparison across multiple signals.
The image shows a collection of experimental MRUI widgets that visualise robotics signals as geometric status forms. It includes ring/gauge modules, radar/spider charts for multi-channel sensing, triangle and polar layouts, and specialised views for potentiometer and motor values (left/right). The overview serves as a design toolkit—representing complex states not only as numbers, but as quickly readable shapes, patterns, and proportions.
The image shows additional MRUI widget studies for robotics telemetry and system diagnostics. At the top are different visualisations for speed over time, ultrasonic distance traces (“Ultra”), and temperature (line charts, area fills, ring gauges). In the middle are “fall-off” views to visualise signal drops, thresholds, and warning states—up to a clear alarm iconography. At the bottom are debug widgets for the data stream/“transmit bytes”, making transmission quality and patterns in the telemetry stream visible.
The image shows MRUI layout studies for a robotics dashboard focused on speed and ultrasonic environment sensing (“Ultra Surround”). At the centre are ring-shaped gauges and multiple variants of the same display (scaling, fill logic, warning markers, different levels of visual density), complemented by speed-over-time histograms for trend monitoring. On the left, the ultrasonic sensing is visualised as a polygonal “environment map”, where individual measurement directions/segments are readable through shape and amplitude—designed for fast orientation and real-time obstacle diagnostics.
The image shows MRUI widget studies for energy and health monitoring in robotics systems. Several variants visualise three key metrics—current, voltage, and temperature—using a triangular/polar representation, including scales, marker points, and warning segments. The different layouts explore how thresholds, load states, and anomalies (e.g., overcurrent, voltage sag, thermal peaks) can be read compactly and compared quickly.