Company
Date Published
Author
Serena Kappes
Word count
814
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

Yonatan Mevorach, an Infrastructure Team Lead at Wix, creatively repurposed a mini-arcade machine into a Grafana dashboard display using a Raspberry Pi, addressing the challenge of remote work during COVID-19 that limited him to a single monitor. Motivated by the need to monitor a newly launched service more closely, Mevorach reverse-engineered the arcade machine, replacing its components like the CPU with a Raspberry Pi Zero, which allowed for programmability, internet connectivity, and continuous power via USB. By examining the circuit board and researching online, he identified the necessary connections, including the ground pin, and swapped in an LCD screen compatible with the Raspberry Pi. Despite his background in JavaScript, he adapted the necessary Python code to JavaScript to operate the display drivers effectively. After successfully rendering Grafana graphs on the screen using the Grafana API, Mevorach completed his project by soldering the components together, marking his first venture into electronics hacking and expressing interest in future projects that might be battery or solar-powered.