Building Dashboards

Installing & Running Studio

Studio ships as a single Windows executable — there's no installer and no separate background service to set up. The exe is the whole product.

Install

Copy the exe
Copy SignalStreamStudio.exe anywhere on the PC, e.g. C:\SignalStream\.
Run it and log in
Launching it opens a small status window and adds an orange SignalStream icon to the system tray. Select Open Dashboard and sign in with your email and one-time code — see Login & Accounts.
Enable Start with Windows (recommended)
Right-click the tray icon and tick Start with Windows. No admin rights needed — Studio then resumes automatically after every reboot, as soon as that Windows user logs in.

Note

You only log in once. Your session is cached in Windows Credential Manager, so every later start resumes polling with no login step. Only the very first login needs internet access — after that, Studio can poll offline (Basic plan) with no cloud dependency.

How Studio behaves once running

Status window. Shows your dashboard name, running state, cloud/sync status, and per-input polling health. Live values aren't shown here — only in the browser canvas. Closing the window (X) just hides it back to the tray; double-click the tray icon, or its Status menu item, to reopen it.
Open Dashboard from the tray menu opens the editor/viewer at http://localhost:8500 in your browser.
Exit is deliberate. The only way to stop Studio is tray menu → Exit, which warns you that polling and cloud sync will stop. The status window's X button never kills it.
Single instance. Running the exe again while Studio is already running doesn't start a second copy — it just opens the dashboard in your browser and exits.

Running unattended (24/7 PC)

"Start with Windows" only runs Studio while a user is logged in — if the PC sits at the Windows login screen, polling stops and remote viewers see STUDIO OFFLINE. If a PC needs to collect data with nobody logged in, set Studio up as a Task Scheduler task instead:

Create the scheduled task (one-time, needs an admin prompt)
From an elevated PowerShell:
schtasks /Create /TN "SignalStream Studio" /TR '"C:\SignalStream\SignalStreamStudio.exe"' /SC ONSTART /RU SYSTEM /RL HIGHEST /F
Configure it to survive failures
In Task Scheduler (taskschd.msc) → "SignalStream Studio" → Properties: on the Settings tab, tick "If the task fails, restart every" (1 minute, 3+ attempts) and untick "Stop the task if it runs longer than"; on the Conditions tab, untick the power conditions so it runs regardless of AC/battery state.
Log in once as SYSTEM
The cached session is per-Windows-account, so the first login needs to happen as the account the task runs under: start the task, then open http://localhost:8500 in any browser on that PC and log in there.

Running as SYSTEM

The tray icon isn't visible in this mode (it runs in session 0) — check status via the browser or the Remote Web Dashboard, and stop it with schtasks /End /TN "SignalStream Studio". Don't combine this with "Start with Windows" for a regular user login on the same PC — only one of the two should own the job.

Verifying a deployment

Studio exposes a couple of local endpoints useful for checking it's alive:

http://localhost:8500/health — returns {"status":"ok"}
http://localhost:8500/api/status — returns login state, cloud connectivity, and which dashboard is running

Logs & data

Logs are written to %ProgramData%\SignalStreamStudio\studio.log (rotating, 3 × 5 MB). The data directory can be overridden with the SIGNALSTREAM_STUDIO_DATA_DIR environment variable if you need Studio's local state somewhere other than the default.