How to Install 'the' Lovely Dashboard (Instructions on PC, via SimHub)

how's it going Sim Racers Daniel here from Daniel Newman racing and in today's short video I'm going to give you a tutorial on how you can install the incredibly popular lovely dashboard for your dedicated display units or ddus so walking through the steps the first thing we need to do is navigate to the internet find yourself a Google page and download the lovely dashboard the lovely dashboard can be downloaded one of two different ways the first is for public public releases which are available to non-members so anybody can access this and anybody can download it as long as they have an internet connection the second method is for people who are members of the lovely racing community and I'll demonstrate that method in a few minutes but first of all we're going to look at the public release download version and how we do that so opening an internet window with your Explorer of choice we need to find a lovely dashboard the easiest way to do that is to head to to Google search for lovely dashboard and then hit search the download link that we're looking for is the top one listed here the GitHub link now GitHub is where lovely dashboard is stored you may find across the internet other versions of loveely dashboard that others have uploaded and stored in various places however the download version that you must and need to download is the one here on GitHub so make sure this is the link that you're looking for and when you find it just click away and navigate to that page when you get to the GitHub page for new users this top section of the page might be a little bit daunting ignore it and scroll down as you scroll down the page and pass this information it starts to make some sense here is where the lovely dashboard is described and for those of you who have seen it before you will see a nice illustration showing you of what the dashboard is now bear in mind this is the public release so this is the latest version available for everybody to download but as you scroll down the page it will give you some information about the native simulator supported in lovely dashboard and then also how you can join the community so there's a Discord server here which I would highly recommend to join a YouTube channel and then even the Kofi Channel where you can subscribe to become a member and if you've got stream deck perhaps you can download some matching stream deck icons but there's some information on here uh and as I said um lots of instructions and various bits and Bobs about what you can do and how you can do it but hopefully in this video today you're not going to need that because I'm going to walk you through it if we navigate back up the page on the right hand side we're looking for this section here which says releases this is where we download the lovely dashboard so if we click on releases this page loads they are in date order so the version at the top is the version that you need to download but of course if you're looking for an older version version then you could scroll down and find that if needed but lovely dashboard version we're looking for here is the latest 2.5.2 downloading it is as simple as scrolling down to the assets section and then downloading the file that's relevant to you so if looking for the lovely dashboard you're looking for this one here the one that just says lovely dashboard version 2.5.2 simhub Dash that's love you dashboard the love you dashboard also makes an XL version for people who have larger screens and that is easily found by looking for the Excel version just here the files below at the moment can be ignored they are additional components that those who stream potentially um could look at using instead or an overlay as shown here um but I will also demonstrate how you can use lovely dashboard as an overlay soon so ignore these three files here ignore the source files you're looking at loveely dashboard for conventional size ddus the XL for ones that are wider things like the Porsche grid by Porsche and then also the lovely dashboard settings now this is an important file as well and then lastly the lovely Dash background so I'm going to download these files by clicking on them and they have now all downloaded I can now close this window entirely then we need to navigate to our downloads folder and here we will find our downloads the first thing we need to do is install the dashboard I've just downloaded the XL version if you double click the dashboard it will open up a prompt in simhub asking you to install simply press the button that says import into simhub library and then overwrite it if it already exists now I've already got it so I'm not going to hit okay but if you hit okay it would just simply be there in your simhub folder if we go to simhub I'll show you where you will find it it's on the dash Studio page listed here and then I've got the Excel version so we're looking for lovely dashboard Excel as shown here that simple there's another step to make sure you complete when installing the dashboard and that's these two files here the settings file and the lovely Dash background file what we need to do is navigate to our C drive to program files and then to simhub we then need to find this folder here called JavaScript extensions and that is where we need to put that settings file and that background so if I open up a second window these files we've just downloaded here the settings and the lovely dashboard just need to be dragged and dropped in this folder now I'm not going to do it currently as I've already got a working version here but it's a simple as dragging and dropping and then your lovely dashboard is complete there are some settings that you can change within this file however changing these settings should be done carefully this file is very sensitive to mistakes so a missing comma for instance if I was to delete this comma would break the settings file if I was to add one comma too many it would break the settings file and unfortunately that's how coding works so you need to make sure when you're editing this file that you're putting information between points as shown here if you put it for example after the speech bracket it will not work you also need to make sure that you don't as I demonstrated delete that comma again it won't work so make sure that you do take care when editing this file but this file will give you some customizable options to make the dashboard function appropriately for yourself but simply downloading the files and putting them in this JavaScript folder is enough now the second way you can download lovely dashboard is for the members of the lovely racing community and that's really straightforward and simple too by heading on over to the Discord page for lovely dashboard the lovely dashboard or lovely racing Community has a Discord page called lovely Sim racing and that link can also be found on that GitHub page I showed you a few moments ago when you navigate to the lovely dashboard Discord you will need to first become a member so to become a member remember you need to scroll down to the show your support section when you find the show your support section you can scroll up and you can look at lovely membership now lovely membership does start at € per month all the way up to €9 per month in order to get access to the pre-release versions of lovely dashboard you can join the bottom starter tier the pro tier will give you access to the lovely pit wall something I'll cover in another video and the gold membership will basically give you the rights to say you're supporting an incredible project and funding the ongoing development of lovely dashboard but for those of you that just want to download pre-release versions it's this one here my recommendation would always be to go in at the pro lovely member range because it's both affordable and it gives you the complete access to all the products available those Die Hard members who have been part of the community for a long time I would also recommend gold membership just because it's important to support the developer as you'll soon see once you become a member you can connect your Kofi account to Discord and that is an important step here but once you've connected your uh your Kofi account to Discord you'll have some additional sections appear and they are the members area here in the members area you can navigate to dash releases and then as releases are made available so here was one made on Friday you can download those so here we would simply find the settings file here we would hit download we would find the dash we're looking for either the regular Dash or the Excel Dash and hit download it's that easy we also need to bear in mind that the dashboard has got some prerequisites in terms of simhub and every Dash release version you'll find here it tells you which version of simhub is recommended so when you do use simhub make sure that you check on the bottom left hand corner as shown here which version you are using I would always recommend making sure you have the most upto-date version working but nonetheless it will tell you in the release which version you need to use so that's the two methods for installing lovely dashboard um you've got the public release available via the website and then you've got the private um pre-release versions available for members on the Discord page once you've got the dashboard within simhub it's really easy to add to your ddu you can head across to your devices page which is hopefully where you've got your um your device units here so mine is generic vocore screen simply click that and then select your dashboard from the drop-down list in this instance I'm looking at lovely dashboard and it's that straightforward those of you that don't have a dashboard or dedicated display unit but you want to use this dashboard you can head back to Dash Studio and you can find the dashboard that you've downloaded so we'll use the Excel version here and you can use that as an overlay now an overlay means it will run on your PC p screen rather than needing to run on a separate device to run on a PC screen you need to make sure the game is run in Window mode and not full screen otherwise every time the game does go to full screen the dashboard will vanish behind it but in Window mode it allows this overlay to sit above the game you simply click on more and then convert to Overlay the dash will then disappear from this list as you can see but it will now move up here to over lays so as you can see here it says overlay we can ignore this warning because it can indeed be started and in order to get it started you simply press new layout and then it pops up on the screen in front of me so if I just drag this out of the way and then move the dash and minimize you can now resize and of course if you've got the game open you can resize this in any way shape you'd like over your game and when you're happy that the size is as you want it you simply press okay and then the dash is ready to go when you've launched your game to close it you press close layout and then job is done but that's how you use as an overlay and of course this is how you use it as a dashboard if you've got it as an overlay and you want to make it back as a dashboard you can go back to more and then you can convert it back to a dashboard again if that's how you choose to use it but that's how you install the lovely dashboard it really is simple um there aren't too many mistakes you can make if you do make a mistake and for some reason the lovely dashboard is not functioning correctly I would suggest that you check your settings file you ensure that you've only got one of them downloaded and in the JavaScript folder and that you've not made any edits and there is a stray comma or something in there that shouldn't be because nine times out of 10 that is the primary cause of mistakes and errors nonetheless hopefully you found today's video very very useful in the next video we're going to take a deeper dive into the lovely dashboard look at what it is how it works its various functions and then we're going to look at it running on a display unit on my SIM rig as well in the meantime hopefully you have found today's video very very useful uh don't forget to leave your comments in the section below hit the Thumbs Up Button if you like the video perhaps subscribe to the channel and then hopefully I will see you next time happy racing guys goodbye

Channel: Daniel Newman Racing

Views: 4,402

Keywords: sim racing, simracing, simucube, cubecontrols, cube controls, gt3, acc, assetto corsa competizione, iracing, simlab, sparco, ompracing, asm2, formula one, f1, formula 1

Id: uotiZpqBW5c

Length: 13min 18sec (798 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 15 2024