Dashboards are the São Bento azulejos

How Coreflux Dashboards turn live MQTT data into shareable, no-code views your whole enterprise can read

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An episode of "Everything Reminds Me of Coreflux"

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The Estação de São Bento in Porto is a working train station. Trains come in, passengers come out, the schedules tick on the board overhead. But the real reason the station is on every postcard is the walls. Twenty thousand azulejos, the blue-and-white painted tiles Portugal is famous for, cover the main hall floor to ceiling. Each panel is a different scene from Portuguese history. Battles, harvests, transports, kings, weddings, harvests again.

You don't read them one at a time. You walk in. You look up. You see a thousand years of a country in a single room, and you understand.

That is what a dashboard is supposed to do.

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The dashboard problem most teams already have

Industrial dashboards used to mean expensive BI tools and a frontend team. Grafana for the engineers. Power BI for the business. Two tools, two truths, two maintenance burdens, two sets of accounts to manage. The engineers see one version. The executives see another. Neither side trusts the other's dashboard, and the meeting about it lasts twice as long as it should.

Even worse: most dashboards lag. They query a database every few seconds. By the time the executive sees the number, the machine has done another cycle. The dashboard is wrong, just predictably wrong.

Then there's the TV problem. Every factory has a screen on the wall meant to show the live status of something. Getting a dashboard on that screen usually means a dedicated HMI tool, a separate license, a contractor who set it up two years ago, and a Raspberry Pi nobody is allowed to reboot.

The simple thing should be simple. It is not.

We built Coreflux Dashboards because the simple thing should be simple again.

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One Dashboard Manager, every widget

Dashboards live inside the Hub. Open the Dashboard Manager from the dock, like any other app. The panels you've already built are listed there, ready to open, edit, share, or full-screen.

To build a new one, you drag.

Readouts.

Gauges, large numbers with units, on/off indicators, fault lights, wall-sized KPI numerals for the lobby screen.

Charts.

Line for trends, bar for comparisons, progress bars for completion.

Industrial symbols.

Pumps, valves, tanks with live fill, motors, instruments. The kind of icons every SCADA system has, native to the canvas.

Controls.

Buttons, toggles, sliders, text fields, forms. Two-way bindings. The dashboard isn't just a display, it's also a remote.

Media.

Cameras, video, images, audio, custom mimic drawings. The dashboard can show the machine, not just the data about the machine.

Identification.

Barcode and QR displays, scanner widgets.

Maps and tables.

Geo maps for fleet tracking, live tables for inventory, dropdowns that update from real data.

Layout and alerts.

Section labels, banners that fire when a condition is met.

Each widget wires to a live MQTT topic. The data flows in. The widget updates. No polling, no refresh button, no exported CSV.

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The share button is the killer feature

Every panel has a URL. Copy it. Open it on a TV, a tablet, a kiosk PC, a contractor's laptop, a phone. Same live data. Read-only by default. Full-screen kiosk mode. No login required to view.

This is the line in Leirião’s demo where customers go quiet.

The factory floor TV no longer needs an HMI license. The executive looking at their tablet at home no longer needs a Hub account. The contractor who needs to see one specific dashboard gets the URL and nothing else. The dashboard goes where the dashboard needs to be.

The same panel inside the Hub, on a control-room screen, and on a phone. One source of truth, many surfaces.

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AI can draft it for you

The AI Assistant from last episode can also build dashboards.

Open the chat. Type "Build a dashboard with temperature, pressure, and uptime for line 1." The Assistant generates the panel, picks the right widgets, binds them to your actual topics, and deploys. You refine the last 20%.

Plain language in. Working dashboard out. The loop closes inside the Hub.

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The room is the dashboard

The trick of São Bento isn't any single panel. None of them, on their own, would carry the station. Put them together in one room, in the right composition, and you walk in and feel something you couldn't describe afterwards.

A factory dashboard works the same way. The temperature reading on its own is a number. The output count on its own is a number. The valve status on its own is a binary. Put them together in one panel, in the right composition, and the operator walks in and understands the line. The executive walks in and understands the business. The engineer walks in and understands the next thing to fix.

The panels are sources. The room is the dashboard.

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Watch the episode

João Leirião, our Go-To-Market Manager and the person who watches customers go “Wow” when this part of the demo starts, walks through Coreflux Dashboards in the sixth and final episode of Everything Reminds Me of Coreflux. João Barroso starts the conversation inside São Bento with André, surrounded by twenty thousand tiles of history, and at some point in the final scene they say goodbye to their adventures in Porto.

I’m not crying, you’re crying.

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