About

benchhud is the command center for a board-repair bench — a HUD shell that hosts pluggable panels, so everything I need while working on a board lives in one window instead of three.

The panels that matter:

  • Scope — the live microscope feed.
  • Thermal fusion — a thermal camera registered onto the scope image, so a component’s heat bloom lands right on top of the component itself. A short on a rail lights up the part that’s drawing current — the headline feature.
  • Instrument telemetry — live DMM and power-supply readings pulled over SCPI, on screen next to the work instead of on a bench meter I have to glance away at.
  • Tool launcher — one-click into the adjacent repair tools (OpenBoardView, a chip programmer GUI, and so on).

It composites the whole thing to a virtual camera, so OBS can grab it straight into a stream. That’s the other half of the point — it’s built to power board-repair and project-building streams, not just my own bench.

It’s Linux-first and still in active development — planned open source under MIT once it’s past the “works on my bench” stage.