Freeboard is a trending open-source project that looks to have some promise. It describes itself as “a damn-sexy, open source real-time dashboard builder for IOT and other web mashups. A free open-source alternative to Geckoboard.”

In an age where data is critical, the means for displaying it intuitively will come at a premium. Luckily, the open-source bug has caught dashboards as well. Now, if you want to display the data that you collect, you can do so easily, and you can collaborate with others to ensure that it will always be this way.

Freeboard is HTML-based, and is simple enough to run as a stand-alone web application. This is why it is ideal for Internet of Things devices that have a limited ability to be able to serve up complex, dynamic pages. It can be run from a local server or hard drive by downloading or cloning the index.html page from Github.

Freeboard is one component of the Internet of Things chain that was missing: a sexy, open-source dashboard that could compile all of the information interconnected devices are passing amongst one another, and display it in an alluring format for human eyes.

You may well see it being used the next time you turn on that smart watch you’ve always wanted.

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Freeboard’s source code. You can contribute there.

Freeboard’s creator Jim Heising, and Bug Labs.