Environmental NeTworked Sensor I: Customizable Dashboard, Layouts, Equations, Export, and Registry

Hi! I’m Mehbub, an indie hacker and full stack engineer from India (GitHub). I’m a Google Summer of Code 2026 contributor with UC OSPO, working on the Environmental NeTworked Sensor (ENTS) project under Colleen Josephson, John Madden, and Alec Levy. You can read my full proposal here.

ENTS — also known as DirtViz — is an open sensing platform for monitoring microbial fuel cell sensors and other environmental measurements in the field. You can see it live at dirtviz.jlab.ucsc.edu.

What I’m building (and why)

The short version: I want the ENTS dashboard to feel like something researchers can actually use day to day, not something that only works when the frontend happens to match the database.

Right now, a lot of the dashboard is still stitched together by hand in React. That gets painful fast when new sensors show up, or when someone wants a different layout for the same cell data.

My main goal is to let the app discover what can be plotted from live database information — mostly from the sensor table — instead of keeping long static chart lists in the frontend. The UI should ask the backend what a cell actually has, then build panels from that answer.

Power and TEROS data may still live on older paths for a while, so the catalog needs a clear bridge between those legacy sources and the newer sensor model.

The feature I’m most excited about is a drag-and-drop dashboard: reorder panels, add or remove them, and keep the layout in the URL so you can share a view with a link. Server-side saved layouts can come later — first I want the client-side behavior to be solid and predictable.

For people comparing multiple cells, I also want loads to feel snappier: fetch in parallel where it makes sense, and ignore stale responses when someone changes cells or dates before the previous request finishes.

After that foundation, I’ll move on to equations for derived metrics (with strict server-side validation) and CSV export of what’s already on screen.

This is incremental work on the existing Flask + React stack, not a rewrite. I’m trying to keep current APIs stable unless there’s a clear reason to extend them.

Tech stack

Python, JavaScript, React, Flask, and PostgreSQL — the same stack ENTS already uses.

I’ll share progress updates as the summer goes on. Stay tuned!