Your MARS dashboard, on real hardware. MarsDisplay renders the MARS /display web page in a
real browser and streams it to a small USB display panel, so the status wall shows
live data instead of a static picture.
Cheap USB screens ship with vendor software that mirrors a screenshot and gives you no control. MarsDisplay does it properly: a real Chromium engine renders your dashboard, every frame is encoded and pushed over the panel's own USB interface, and you decide when capture runs. No scraping, no screen capture, no vendor app.
- Renders your page for real. A bundled Chromium (Playwright) draws the MARS URL you configure, so JavaScript, canvas and auto-refreshing charts behave like in a browser.
- Native USB output. 320×480 portrait and 480x320 landscape, RGB565 little-endian, 122 writes / 307,222 bytes per frame over the panel's standard USB-serial interface — no vendor software.
- Brightness you control. 20 / 40 / 60 / 80 / 100 %, saved and applied at Start, adjustable live while the panel is running.
- Tray-first, quiet. Status / Settings, Start, Stop, Exit. One fixed-size settings window (650×560 pixels, reduced in height to fit smaller desktops) with Connection, Display, Startup and Diagnostics tabs. Each page scrolls independently; capture controls and footer messages stay visible. No resizing, maximizing or fullscreen on Windows and Linux. A single instance owns the panel at a time.
- Opt-in automation. Start capturing whenever the app opens, and start the app when you sign in to Windows. Both off by default, both one click to undo.
- Honest state. Live-connected and stale flags, lifetime frame count, native timing logs and a frame preview. Host completion is reported as host completion — never dressed up as an acknowledgement from the panel.
- Windows x64 in an interactive desktop session with a system tray
- The USB screen: SHCHV TUS-35 ("USB Screen"), VID
1A86/ PID5722, serialUSB35INCHIPSV2 - The vendor application closed — it holds the same serial port
- A MARS instance reachable at a plain HTTPS URL that needs no interactive login
- Download the latest release ZIP and extract the whole archive into a new folder.
- Run
MarsDisplay.exe. It waits in the tray, stopped and unconfigured. - Tray → Status / Settings → Connection: enter the MARS URL, click Refresh USB identities, choose your screen explicitly, then Save.
- Start. The panel shows your dashboard and the tray reports frames and live state.
On Windows, settings are stored in %LOCALAPPDATA%\MarsDisplay\settings.json. The first save also
keeps a schema-1 backup beside it, so an older build can always read your setup back.
MARS URL — the HTTP(S) page to display. Nothing loads until you press Start.
Screen selection — Refresh lists available identities and you pick one. Missing, duplicate or unhealthy devices are refused rather than guessed, and the saved identity is displayed read-only afterwards.
Brightness — while stopped, Enable Brightness turns on saved brightness and backs up your current settings first. In Display, slider changes save immediately, independently of Save, even while stopped. The level is applied at Start and live while running.
Startup — Start capture when MarsDisplay opens saves the moment you toggle it and applies to every later launch until you turn it off (save your configuration first). Start MarsDisplay when I sign in to Windows registers the current user only: no admin rights, no service, no scheduled task. If you move the portable folder, use Update startup path when the app offers it.
Start launches the owned browser and opens the panel. On Windows and Linux, Stop stops scheduling capture and lets an already-admitted USB frame or brightness command finish before closing only the resources MarsDisplay created. The current command keeps its original deadline (up to 20 seconds); the UI stays Stopping until cleanup completes. A command rejected before admission is not counted as sent. Timeouts, failed transfers and forced closure still report uncertainty; nothing is resent automatically. This prevents normal Stop from deliberately cutting a frame, but host completion is not confirmation that the physical panel displayed it. Exit waits for acknowledged cleanup before releasing the single-instance lock, so two copies can never fight over the port. If cleanup is uncertain the app says so and refuses a new Start instead of pretending.
Python 3.13 with the pinned dependencies:
pip install -e .
python -m playwright install chromium --only-shell
python -m mars_displayLinux x86_64 targets Pop!_OS based on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. A versioned AppImage build and joint Windows/Linux release mechanism are available in the repository; this does not mean a public Linux release has already been published. See Linux distribution for downloads, checksums, manual USB permissions and the explicitly accepted independent-verification gap, and Linux build instructions to prepare local artifacts. The prototype's physical display and brightness were user-tested on Pop!_OS 24.04; prolonged operation and general Linux compatibility are not established.
Launch manually with python -m mars_display from an interactive desktop with a
working system tray. No tray means startup fails; there is no fallback window.
Run as a non-root user (both real and effective UID must be nonzero) with existing
serial-device permissions. MarsDisplay does not change permissions, install udev
rules, or weaken the Chromium sandbox. Close other software holding the panel.
Linux settings use $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/MarsDisplay/settings.json when XDG_CONFIG_HOME
is absolute and nonempty; otherwise $HOME/.config/MarsDisplay/settings.json.
Backups, the instance lock and capture-on-launch preference live alongside it.
There is no migration from Windows settings. Windows login controls are hidden;
Start capture when MarsDisplay opens remains a separate, persistent opt-in,
not Linux autostart. Stop or Exit cancels pending launch capture.
See Linux runtime limits before attempting hardware use.
The test suite is headless Qt plus a loopback browser fixture; it never touches USB:
QT_QPA_PLATFORM=offscreen PLAYWRIGHT_BROWSERS_PATH=0 PYTHONPATH=src .venv/bin/python -m unittest discover -s tests -vHardware and protocol notes, settings and recovery guarantees, runtime behaviour and
release engineering live in docs/.
GPL-3.0-only. MarsDisplay is an independent project, not affiliated with the panel vendor.
