Dashboards
Sensa organises everything your van can do into a handful of dashboards. Each dashboard is a full screen built for one job, so you are never hunting through a single long page.
The five dashboards
| Dashboard | Built for |
|---|---|
| Habitation | Living in the van: power, water, lights, heating and your network |
| Cab | Driving and parking up: engine dials, the map and levelling |
| Mobile | Your phone: a tab bar along the bottom keeps everything in reach of your thumb, and its Navigation screen is the same as the Cab map |
| Intelligence | Alarms, scenes, instincts, routines, a message log and, when your system knows where it is, the Schengen day counter |
| Settings | Configuring the system: devices, network, backups, licence and updates |
Moving between dashboards
Every dashboard has a menu button (the three-line icon) at the top left, next to the Sensa logo. Tap it to jump to any of the other dashboards, or to log out.
In a web browser, the tab shows the Sensa icon and reads Sensa, and a shortcut you add to a phone's home screen is called Sensa too. A shortcut added before this update keeps its old name until you remove it and add it again.
With Nerd Mode on, the menu also has Clear cache, just above Log out. Use it if a screen still looks the way it did before an update: it throws away the copy of the screens your tablet or phone has stored and reloads them fresh. Your choices on that screen, such as Nerd Mode and locked cards, are kept. Sensa does the same for you after every update.
To put a dashboard's tabs in the order you want, turn on Design Mode, then press and hold a tab until it lifts, drag it along the strip, and let go. With a mouse, press and move. The order is kept on your Sensa unit, so every screen showing that dashboard uses it, and it survives restarts and updates. A tab that appears later, such as one Nerd Mode shows, takes its usual place beside its neighbours.
Which dashboards you see depends on how you signed in. Everyday tablet logins see Habitation, Cab, Mobile and Intelligence. On a unit we supplied they also see Settings, which asks for a PIN first if you have switched Admin Lock on. See Accounts and access for who can do what.
Nerd Mode
The header on every dashboard carries a glasses button, just right of the Sensa logo. It is one switch for the whole system rather than a setting per screen, and it decides whether Sensa shows you the technical detail behind what you are looking at.
With it off, each screen keeps to what you would act on. Turn it on and the rest appears: the extra readings on the cards that have them, a History tab on Habitation, and the Diagnostics and Log tabs on Settings. The Network tab keeps to one card saying whether you are online, over what, and how well; with Nerd Mode on a tablet it becomes a diagram of the whole network. A managed network switch, which has nothing on it you would ever change, is not shown at all until it is on, and neither is the raw pitch and roll reading on the levelling tabs. Turn it off and the screens go back to the short version.
It only changes what you are shown. Nothing about the van behaves differently either way.
Design Mode
Beside the glasses is a pencil-and-ruler button, Design Mode. With it off, the screen stays exactly as it is, so nothing moves under a stray finger. Turn it on to rearrange things, and the header changes colour so you can see you are arranging rather than using the screen. Every item you can move then shows an outline.
With Design Mode on you can:
- Reorder tabs along the tab strip, and scenes along their row and on the Home and Cab tiles.
- Move a card on a tab that can be arranged, by dragging it, and resize it by dragging its corner. Short cards stack beside tall ones. A card cannot be made shorter than what is on it.
- Stretch a card with the two switches along its bottom edge: full width spreads it across the tab, full height takes it down to the bottom of the screen. Most cards grow and shrink with the room you give them, so a card made larger shows everything on it larger, and one made smaller still fits.
- Reorder the instincts on the Intelligence Instincts tab by dragging their tiles.
- Remove a card with the X on its corner.
- Add a card with Add card. The gallery shows the cards you removed from this tab first, then any cards Suggested for this tab, then the cards from every other tab, grouped by dashboard and tab. It also holds cards that are on no tab to start with, such as the Weather card and a single dial for each of your temperature sensors and tanks.
- Reset a tab to how it was built.
Nothing you change is kept until you press Save. Once you change something, the bar shows Save, Cancel and Reset: Cancel puts the tab back as it was before you started, and Reset shows the tab as it was built, ready for you to Save. A card you add appears straight away, before you save. Turning Design Mode off without saving drops your changes.
Each card shows its name while Design Mode is on, so if you need to tell us about one, you can tell us which.
A dealer that supplied your screens may fix the design of every page. The Design Mode button then does not appear, and the screens stay as your dealer set them.
Not every tab can be arranged. The other Intelligence tabs and the Settings tabs that are a single page, such as Images, People, Backup and System, stay as they are; Settings Switches can be reordered but not resized.
Pick an item up by pressing and holding it until it lifts, or with a mouse by pressing and moving, and let go where you want it. On a tablet, a finger that moves straight away scrolls the screen instead, and carrying a card near the top or bottom edge scrolls it for you. Your layout is kept on your Sensa unit, so every screen showing that tab uses it, and it survives restarts and updates. A phone keeps the order of the cards but stacks them in one column.
Design Mode belongs to the screen you turn it on at, so arranging on your phone leaves the cab screen alone, and it turns itself off when the page reloads. If Admin Lock is on, turning it on asks for the Settings PIN. Turning it off never does.
The Order of use list on the Network tab is the one thing that drags without Design Mode, because its order is a setting for your router rather than a layout.
Choosing what appears on Home
You decide which devices show up on the Home screens, and where. Open Settings, choose the Devices tab, and tap the cog at the end of the device's row. Heaters, lights, air conditioners and the van level each offer two settings, one for the Habitation Home screen and one for the Cab Home screen.
Home Layout is which column the device's compact card sits in: Off, Left, Middle or Right. Home Order is where it sits among the others in that column, lowest number first. Leave it alone and devices fall into alphabetical order.
The Cab Home screen has a single column beside the map, so there Left comes first, then Middle, then Right. Off keeps a device off that screen. The full controls always remain on the Lighting and Climate tabs.
Locking a card
A finger scrolling the page past a dial can land on the dial and change a setting by accident. Cards with a dial carry a padlock beside the power button: the air-conditioner card, and the climate summary on the Home screen. Tap the padlock and the card freezes as it is. The dial stops taking a drag, so the gesture scrolls the page instead, and every control on the card, the power button included, stops responding until you unlock it. Only the padlock itself stays live.
The lock belongs to the screen you set it on. Locking a card on your phone leaves the same card working on the cab screen, and a card you locked stays locked on that screen after a reload.
Temperatures
Temperatures are always shown in the unit your system is set to (for example °C), no matter what a particular sensor reports in. You can change the unit in Settings, under System.
The header bar across every dashboard can carry a temperature reading beside the scene chip, and you choose which. Open Settings, choose the Devices tab, tap the cog at the end of a temperature sensor's row and switch on Show Temperature In Header. Nothing is shown until you pick one, so choose however many fit your screen. The Climate tab shows every temperature whatever you pick here.
A shorter name for the header. Any device that can put a reading in the header, a temperature sensor or a Starlink dish for example, also has a Header Short Name box on its row. Type a short name there, "Dish" rather than "Starlink Mini Roof Dish", and the header uses it, so more readings fit across the bar. Leave it blank and the header uses the device's usual name.