Another aspect of the robotics system that I wanted to add was a way to control the robotics board over bluetooth. Sending commands over bluetooth is easy. But I wanted something that was visually stunning, so that students would get excited about the possibility of controls. Who doesn't love fancy remote controls. So I started looking into how hard it would be to create dials in Qt. I've done quite a bit of widget Qt programming in the past, so it wasn't too hard to throw together some code that was drawing good looking dials. As I went along I kept adding features and making everything configurable, so that an end user could create any kind of control panel they could imagine. This is what I came up with after much fiddling. These are just two examples of what the control panel could look like. Really, all you need to do is configure the text file:

I'm really happy with how it came out. All the dials are completely customizable, all the colors, size and position of the numbers, ticks, needles, etc.