CAR-TER

Customizable Adaptive Remote & Telemetry Enabled Reporting

Your phone becomes any remote. Design your own interface with JSON, connect over MeshSocket, and control anything — smart home, music, IoT, dev tools — all from one app.

How It Works

CAR-TER renders layouts — JSON files that describe a grid of interactive controls. Each control can send commands and receive live data over a persistent WebSocket mesh.

A layout defines tabs, each containing a grid of controls. Controls range from simple buttons and toggles to live gauges, sparklines, maps, and graphs. Everything is driven by data — what you see on screen is exactly what the JSON describes.

The Control System

Every control in CAR-TER is declared as a JSON object with a type, id, and grid position. The system supports 28 control types across three categories:

Input Controls

Buttons, toggles, sliders, steppers, pickers, date pickers, text inputs, color pickers, and segmented controls. These send user actions to your server. Container controls — carousels, flip cards, and accordions — arrange sets of groups into swipeable pages, flippable faces, and collapsible sections.

Display Controls

Gauges, progress rings, sparklines, labels, images, maps, and graphs. These visualize incoming telemetry data in real time.

Data Flow

Every control can sync with the server. Input controls fire actions — events sent over the mesh. Display controls listen for incoming data and update automatically.

MeshSocket Protocol

CAR-TER communicates through MeshSocket — a lightweight WebSocket mesh networking protocol. Devices connect to a central server and join channels with assigned roles.

How Devices Connect

  1. Each device opens a WebSocket to the MeshSocket server
  2. The device sends an identify message with its name, channel, and role
  3. The server routes messages between devices in the same channel
  4. Controls fire events that flow through the mesh to all listeners

Message Types

  • emit — fire-and-forget broadcast to the channel
  • request — send a message and await a response
  • broadcast — server pushes data to all channel members
  • identify — authenticate and join a channel

Sync Configuration

Controls declare their data bindings in a sync array:

{
  "type": "gauge",
  "id": "cpu-gauge",
  "sync": [{
    "method": "meshsocket",
    "type": "listen",
    "event": "telemetry",
    "valuePath": "cpu"
  }]
}

When the server emits a telemetry event with {"cpu": 73}, the gauge updates to 73 automatically.

Chat

CAR-TER includes a built-in chat control powered by MeshSocket. Messages flow through the mesh in real time and are persisted locally with SwiftData.

Chat uses the same channel and identity system as all other controls — your display name comes from the connection config, and messages are routed through the mesh to all channel members.

Layout Structure

A layout JSON file has this shape:

{
  "name": "My Layout",
  "headerTitle": "Dashboard",
  "accentColor": "#667eea",
  "tabs": [
    {
      "title": "Controls",
      "icon": "slider.horizontal.3",
      "grid": { "columns": 4, "rows": 6 },
      "children": [ ... ]
    }
  ],
  "connection": {
    "url": "ws://192.168.1.100:4444",
    "identity": {
      "name": "My Phone",
      "channel": "home",
      "role": "controller"
    }
  }
}

Tap any node in the graph to explore the full documentation for each control type, system feature, and data model.

Get Started

  1. Explore the docs — tap nodes in the graph to learn about each control
  2. Write a layout — create a JSON file following the Layout Config schema
  3. Run a server — start a MeshSocket server to handle events
  4. Connect — load your layout and watch it come alive

The full MeshSocket server implementation and protocol documentation is available on GitHub:

github.com/carterbeaudoin/MeshSocket