in the box
Custom
Any page in a tile: a Grafana panel, a camera feed, an HTML file you wrote yourself.
- needs
- A URL.
- refreshes
- On your schedule, or never
- sizes
- 2×2 up to 12×6 cells
This is the escape hatch. Point it at a URL and that page lives in a tile: a Grafana panel you already built, a camera feed, an internal status page, or a single HTML file you wrote in ten minutes and dropped on a web server.
It exists because the honest answer to "does Perch have a widget for X" is often no, and waiting for one is a bad answer when the thing you want is already a web page. Set a reload interval if the page does not refresh itself, and a zoom level so a layout built for a laptop is legible on an 800×480 panel.
When the page you are embedding starts to feel like it wants to be a real widget, it is one folder away from being one.
what you can set
Every field here is generated from the widget’s manifest, so the settings form exists without anyone having written one.
- The URL
- A title for the tile
- How often to reload it
- Zoom, so a desktop layout fits a small panel
Nothing to install.
Custom ships with Perch. Clone the repo, run the installer, open the console from your laptop or phone, and drag the tile where you want it — the desk screen follows as you drag. If the tile you want is not one of the eight, a widget is one folder of about forty lines and the agent in your terminal can write it.