Digital thermometer

Who it’s for

Anyone reading a temperature that spans cold to hot — outdoor sensors, cold-chain monitoring, process temperatures that cross zero. The default range runs from −60 to 60 with a cold-to-hot color ramp, so the reading carries its own interpretation.

What it does

The Digital thermometer draws a temperature as a glowing ring on a dark face, colored from blue through purple and pink to red as the value rises. Over the default −60 to 60 range, a reading of −20 sits in the blue part of the ramp and one of 45 in the red, so the color says cold or hot before the number is read.

• A cold-to-hot color ramp ships configured, which is the one convention every reader already knows.
• The range crosses zero by default, which suits outdoor and cold-chain readings that a 0–100 gauge cannot show.
• A full-width glowing ring makes it readable at distance on a dark board.
• Animated movement is on by default, so a drifting temperature is visible as movement.
• Minimum and maximum are printed at the ring’s ends, keeping the scale explicit.
• Units are converted, not just appended — the gauge respects the unit set on the key and converts to the unit chosen on the widget.
• The Digital thermometer shows one current reading: temperature history belongs on a Range chart, which colors a trace by the same kind of bands.

How to set up

Data keys

The Digital thermometer takes one datasource, one entity and one data key.

Key	Role	Type	Description
Any temperature key	The value the ring fills to	Timeseries	Numeric only. An attribute works equally well. The key’s own units and decimals override the widget-level ones.

Range

Setting	Default	Effect
Min value	-60	The cold end of the ring
Max value	60	The hot end of the ring
Bar color levels	Blue, purple, pink, red	The cold-to-hot ramp the fill moves through

Narrow the range to what the sensor actually sees. A cold room living between 2 and 8 degrees occupies a sliver of the default −60 to 60 scale, and the ring barely moves however far the temperature drifts.

How to customize

• To match the scale to the sensor — set Min value and Max value to the band the reading actually occupies.
• To put the color boundaries at the limits that matter — edit the Bar color levels, so the ramp changes at the temperature that triggers action.
• To tune the glow — set Neon glow effect brightness, or 0 to remove the effect.
• To thin the ring — reduce Relative bar width, which leaves more room for the value.
• To change how the value moves — set the Animation duration and easing rule.
• To mark a threshold — turn on Ticks and add that temperature.
• To add a caption — turn on Units title and set its text.
• To change the gauge’s shape — set Type to Arc, Donut, Horizontal bar or Vertical bar.

Tips

• Narrow the range before deploying this anywhere the temperature is controlled. On a wide scale a controlled process looks perfectly steady right up until it fails, because a two-degree excursion is invisible across a hundred-and-twenty-degree ring.
• Keep the color ramp cold-to-hot even after narrowing the range. Readers bring that expectation with them, and a thermometer where high values are blue is misread far more often than it is questioned.