BottomDash

A tiny bottom-screen dashboard for the AYN Thor running Armada OS.

It gives the otherwise-idle lower OLED a job: a clock and battery indicator on a black background. It runs through Armada's armada-run-bottom, allowing dual-screen applications to lease the lower display and automatically returning to BottomDash when they're done.

Disclaimer

This project is vibe coded. I am not a Qt developer. I wanted my bottom screen to show a clock and battery level, and through sufficient bullying of an LLM, now it does.

I was, in fact, too lazy to even write this README myself. The same LLM wrote it. Adjust your expectations accordingly.

Building

Requires Qt 6 and CMake. Armada already includes the Qt runtime; development packages can be installed in a Fedora Distrobox to avoid modifying the host OS.

cmake -B build
cmake --build build

Copy the resulting executable somewhere permanent:

mkdir -p ~/.local/bin
cp build/bottomdash ~/.local/bin/

Running

To run BottomDash manually in Armada Gaming Mode:

/usr/bin/armada-run-bottom -- ~/.local/bin/bottomdash

Starting automatically

Create ~/.config/systemd/user/bottomdash.service:

[Unit]
Description=BottomDash lower-screen dashboard
After=gamescope-session-plus@steam.service
BindsTo=gamescope-session-plus@steam.service

[Service]
Type=simple
ExecStartPre=/bin/sh -c 'while [ ! -S /tmp/gamescope-lease.sock ]; do sleep 1; done'
ExecStart=/usr/bin/armada-run-bottom -- /usr/bin/env QT_QPA_PLATFORM=wayland %h/.local/bin/bottomdash
Restart=on-failure
RestartSec=2

[Install]
WantedBy=gamescope-session-plus@steam.service

Then enable it:

systemctl --user daemon-reload
systemctl --user enable bottomdash.service

BottomDash should now start with Armada Gaming Mode. Applications such as Azahar can lease the lower display normally; when they exit, BottomDash returns automatically.

Note that using BottomDash this way may conflict with Armada's Plasma Mobile bottom-screen session.

Scope

Clock. Battery. OLED black.

That's it. The bottom screen has a job now.