IRL Dashboard
A single-screen control panel for IRL streaming that runs on the router in your backpack — SRTLA modem bonding, cameras, publishing, chat, GPS, weather, audience games and a visual live-overlay designer. Bond every SIM and Wi-Fi uplink, control what is on air, and build your graphics from the same page you pull up on your phone mid-stream. No laptop, no cloud service in the middle, and it keeps working on cellular.
★ Built for the new
GL.iNet Mudi 7 (GL-E5800) — a quad-core ARM router with the horsepower to bond several 5G modems and run the whole dashboard at once. The dashboard itself runs on any OpenWRT / GL.iNet router; the bonding sender is built for the Mudi 7.
Invite only
IRL Dashboard is free, and currently available only by personal invitation. Each invited person receives a unique, one-time install link; there is no public download and no public installer. The dashboard is installed with one private command and set up entirely in the browser, from a phone if you like — every setting is optional, and a tab you leave unconfigured simply does not appear.
Invitations are issued directly or by request. To politely request one, email [email protected] and include your use case, who referred you, and your level of expertise with streaming technology.
This address is only for invitation requests, not for technical support. Help comes from the community: the wiki and the StreamHelpers Discord. Requests without the required details, including single-line emails, will be deleted.
What you need
• For the full experience, a
GL.iNet Mudi 7 (GL-E5800). The dashboard runs on any router with
OpenWRT; the SRTLA bonding sender is a native binary built for the Mudi 7's aarch64 CPU. On other routers the dashboard runs — the Bonding tab simply shows the sender as not installed.
• Your SIMs / modems and any Wi-Fi you want to bond. Plug them in — bonding auto-discovers every live uplink. Spare Android phones can join the bond too (see below).
• A receiver to reassemble the bonded stream: one Docker container on any always-on machine with a public address (see below).
• Whatever you already stream with: a Director Mini, a DJI camera, an SJCAM, phones with the Companion app, or OBS. A USB GPS receiver and a USB Bluetooth adapter are optional extras.
Why these pieces?
Every part of this stack was picked for a reason, and almost all of it is optional. Here is the honest version, including what you give up by dropping each one.
1 Why the Mudi 7? It is the only router of its kind that puts all of this in one tight package — multiple modems, the radios, the battery, and enough CPU to run the bond and the dashboard at the same time. The horsepower is not a nice-to-have; it is what this software needs. The dashboard itself runs on any OpenWRT router, but the bonding sender is a native binary built for the Mudi 7's aarch64 CPU.
2 Why a Director Mini? Because the Mudi 7 cannot do this part. It is built on a Qualcomm mobile-broadband platform, which has
no video encoder in it at all — no hardware encode block, and not the kind of CPU that encodes 1080p in software while it is also bonding your modems. The Director Mini has a dedicated hardware encoder, so it composites your overlays and encodes for near-nothing in power.
You can skip it. The bond accepts any SRT Caller source — a phone app, OBS, a hardware encoder, or a phone running the StreamHelpers Companion app as the director. That is direct mode. The catch is overlays: the weather, GPS, clock and chat overlays are web pages, so your encoder has to be able to load a URL as a video source (OBS and the Companion director can; most phone apps cannot) and be able to reach the router to fetch it — over your LAN, or something like Tailscale if it is not on the same network. No Director Mini IP in Settings simply hides that tab.
3 Why SRTLA? It is free, self-hosted, works well, and it just works. No account, no subscription, no third party in the middle of your stream.
You can skip it and let your encoder send straight out to wherever you stream. But then you are on one connection: bonding several modems into one resilient stream is SRTLA, so skipping it means giving up the thing this router was chosen for. With bonding switched off, the same tab becomes Stream Input and simply lists the addresses your camera can publish to.
4 Why Restreamer? Same reasons — free, self-hosted, works really well, and your stream keys stay on your own box.
You can skip it and send the reassembled stream anywhere you like. Just remember something still has to republish it: the bond arrives as SRT, and YouTube, Twitch and Kick want RTMP, so you need some republisher at that end — Restreamer is simply one that is free and already packaged in the receiver with srtla_rec. Restream.io is supported as well, from its own tab. Leave the Restreamer settings blank and that tab disappears.
5 Why a DJI camera? Because it is a camera you can actually
control from the same screen you are already watching — pair it, set its quality and stabilization, and see whether it is really sending video, without picking up a second device mid-walk. On the Mudi 7 it can also run
direct: straight through the router and out over the bonded link with no external encoder in the path at all.
Entirely optional, and off unless you turn it on in Settings — leave it off and the tab never appears. It needs a USB Bluetooth adapter on the router to do the pairing. Any other camera works fine; you just point it at the bond like any other SRT source and control it on the camera itself. SJCAM cameras and phone camera apps have their own tabs.
6 Why GPS? Because location is the one thing an IRL audience always asks about, and it drives more than a map: the live track, distance travelled, and the map, satellite, radar and speed overlays all come off the same fix. It also gives the weather and radar overlays somewhere to point without you typing a location, tells the theme-park tab which park you are in, and feeds
Tell me about this place and
What am I looking at?.
Optional. The fix can come from a cheap USB GNSS receiver plugged into the router (that one is inexpensive and known to work), from the router itself, or from any phone running the Companion app. With no source the tab simply never gets a lock and the location overlays stay unused — nothing else is affected.
None of these are required, and that is rather the point: the value is not any one of them, it is all of them on one screen. Your bitrate, your modems, your camera, your chat, your location, your weather and your publishing are normally seven separate apps on a phone you cannot look at while you are walking and talking. Here they are one page, on the router in your backpack, that keeps working on cellular with no cloud service in the middle. Turn on the parts you use and ignore the rest — every tab you leave unconfigured simply is not there.
Nothing here phones home. The bond, the receiver and the publishing all run on hardware you own. The only paid piece is
StreamHelpers Pro, and the dashboard works fine without it.
Modem bonding SRTLA
The Bonding tab turns every modem, tethered phone and Wi-Fi uplink into one resilient stream. It's automatic: plug an uplink in and it joins the bond; unplug it, or lose service, and it drops out — no menus, no per-link fiddling. When one link stutters the others carry it, so your stream rides through dead spots that would drop a single modem.
camera (SRT) → router (srtla_send, bonds all uplinks) → internet → receiver (srtla_rec + Restreamer) → YouTube / Twitch / Kick
Phones can join the bond too. Any Android phone running the StreamHelpers Companion app on the rig's Wi-Fi can share its cellular data into the bond, alongside its GPS. The Bonding tab also supports
Moblink — install the Moblink app on any spare
Android phone, join it to the rig's Wi-Fi, and it relays its cellular data into the bond as another link.
Turn it on in the Bonding tab, set a pairing password, and the app should find the router automatically; the tab lists
the phones currently connected. It is the cheapest way to add carrier diversity — a friend's phone on a different
network becomes an extra uplink for as long as they are standing near you, with no extra hardware to buy.
The bonded stream must be put back together on a machine with a public address — the receiver: one ready-built Docker container holding the SRTLA receiver, datarhei Restreamer for publishing, a backup-video controller for when the bond drops, and Tailscale so the dashboard can reach it privately. It runs on any always-on box — a rented server, a home server or a NAS — and pairs with the dashboard's setup wizard with one code.
Point the Bonding tab at that box, send your camera to the router, and press Start bonding. The tab shows every uplink, live throughput, and a timestamped connection log.
The tabs
The tabs are icons along the top; most carry a small coloured dot (green is fine, amber wants a look, red needs you) and some a live figure. A tab only appears once the thing it controls is set up, so your row may be much shorter than this list.
• Stream status — the guided start and stop screen. It checks each part of the path — the camera, the Director Mini, the bond, your receiver and your Restreamer server — says what needs attention, names the exact stage that failed, and takes you to the right control. With a DJI camera configured, one Connect my camera button does the Bluetooth, the pairing and the start. Stop stream ends it everywhere in the right order — the platforms first, then the cameras — and keeps a record of every stream in Past streams: how long it ran, the data it used, chat, viewers, polls, trivia and more, to look back on or download. It also resets things for the next stream.
• Chat — Pro Chat: YouTube, Twitch, Kick, Facebook, Discord and Restream.io in one timestamped list to read while live. Feature a message on stream with a title, raise private chat alerts that only you see, style celebrations, and put the Director Mini picture behind the chat and full screen, with a small live/bitrate/reachable strip, so one phone shows the shot, the chat and the connection at once. New messages alert the Chat icon while you work elsewhere; the Look button opens What am I looking at?, and with Restream.io, Reply in Restream Chat is one tap away.
• Overlay control — every overlay on one page: switch each on or off while live, Edit to jump straight to its builder, turn whole groups on and off, copy a single overlay's address, or give the encoder one URL that carries everything. Design your own graphics here too.
• OBS — scenes, audio, sources and start/stop in OBS Studio, when OBS is part of your setup.
• Router — a real-time network monitor with per-interface throughput and connection logging, the internal modem, cell scanning and band locking for picking a better tower at a crowded venue, modem reboot, internet failover that moves the router's own traffic between the venue Wi-Fi and cellular within seconds when one stops working (and back when it recovers), and venue Wi-Fi repeater controls for captive portals, camouflage, MAC mode, BSSID locking, TTL/HL and MTU. The WiFi, repeater & radios box spots when your camera and phones share a radio with the venue Wi-Fi — the cause of cameras dropping off in a crowd — and fixes it with one button, opens venue sign-in pages for you, and has a button for every repeater setting, so you never need the router's admin pages. Tailscale for private remote access, a public link for a helper who is not on your Tailscale, and a link for approved remote producers.
• Bonding — SRTLA modem bonding with automatic uplink discovery, Moblink phones, live per-link and aggregate throughput, receive-buffer tuning, and a timestamped connection log. With bonding off it is Stream Input, listing the addresses your camera can publish to.
• Director Mini — a low-latency preview of the live Program feed (scene and GFX as they go out, playing right in the tab), plus connection and program-scene status, scene/GFX controls, stream targets, brightness, timer, temperature and battery, and BRB or Security quick actions.
• Companion — the StreamHelpers Companion app for Android. Every phone on the router shares its GPS and, optionally, its cellular data. Make one phone the director and it takes up to four camera phones, lays the overlays on top, offers 720p, 1080p and 4K at 30 or 60 fps in HEVC or H.264, cuts to BRB clips with a placeable scene caption, and sends the show into the bond. Cameras always publish to the router, so changing director does not mean re-pointing cameras. Chat down the side of the camera screen, crew talkback, multi-camera Pro layouts and adding a phone from across town are Pro.
• DJI, SJCAM, Phone — connect and control the camera you have. DJI: pair over Bluetooth, sensible bitrate choices, stabilization, live-video status, and direct streaming through the Mudi and the bonded SRTLA path when no external encoder is needed. SJCAM and phone camera apps stream straight into the router. When no video is arriving, Stream status offers a button to each enabled camera tab.
• Restreamer — your own receiver's Restreamer: destinations with stable ordering, per-destination connection state, editable stream keys, start/stop controls, direct-video and full-configuration links, live ingest CPU, memory, bandwidth, kbit/s, FPS and uptime, and native 4K passthrough. A preview that never arrives is explained rather than left spinning — the tab tells you whether the server is down, the router is off the tailnet, or this device is.
• Restream.io — go live through Restream.io: sign in, send the stream, start every destination or just the ones you have pre-selected with Start selected, titles, a preview from YouTube, encoder events, and audience numbers (viewers now, peak, views, chat) for you, the header and an overlay.
• GPS — position from a USB GPS, the router or a phone: lock and satellites, live coordinates, map and track, distance and estimated steps, Tell me about this place (what's around me, facts, history, what's on) written by your AI to read out, sharing your position to the Pro live map, the map, satellite, radar and speed overlays and, with Pro, Motion & g-force from a Companion phone.
• Weather, Clock, Timer — current conditions and an hourly forecast strip, the time and date, and countdown or count-up timers with a title and one-tap theme-park actions — each with an overlay you can style.
• Theme parks — off until you enable it. Live wait times, show times and dining from
ThemeParks.wiki: browse the destination directory, pick a park, choose what to list and which details each row carries, then show it as a ticker, a scroller, a static list or one at a time. The encoder URL never changes, so you can switch park mid-trip without touching the encoder. It also teaches the timer what you are queueing for, from the GPS fix.
• Trivia, Polls, Jokes — the audience games, described below.
• Links — your own one-tap buttons: platform dashboards, other streaming tools, and confirm-first webhooks.
• Diagnostics — stage cards for connection, encoding, delivery, ingest and egress, the logs and downloads behind them, a ready-made bug report for Discord, Clear logs to start a test run clean, and Ask AI to explain a problem in plain words.
• StreamHelpers Pro — pair this router with your Pro account.
• Settings — everything you set up once, the guided setup, header chips, share links, backup and restore, system update, and credits.
Across the top of every tab is the header: a row of small chips you choose — battery, bond rate, GPS lock and speed, Restreamer ingest, viewers, chat alerts, the timer and many more; a chip hides when it has nothing true to say. Every panel starts folded to its title, so a tab reads like a menu, and remembers how you left it. Hidden tabs pause their polling and refresh on return; switching tabs never cancels a save, stops your stream or interrupts your chat.
Stream overlays
Use the built-ins or design your own. GPS, map, satellite, radar, lightning, weather, hourly forecast, clock, timer, theme parks, chat feed, featured messages, poll, trivia question and leaderboard, closest guess, emoji meter, joke card and What am I looking at? are ready to use. The visual designer adds text, live router values, uploaded artwork, icons, shapes, animations, and seamless scrolling tickers on a true 16:9 stage.
Turn any browser JSON API into a live graphic. Paste a URL and the designer discovers nested repeating data and available fields. Pick what is displayed, add before/after labels with independent styling, filter and sort rows, and arrange them as a list or continuous ticker. The encoder fetches fresh data while the overlay is live; the API must allow browser requests through CORS.
One browser source can run everything. Add the all-in-one URL to OBS, the Director Mini or the Companion director once, then use the Overlay control switches to show and hide individual overlays — singly or in groups — without touching the encoder. Each overlay's design card also carries its own on/off switch. You can still send separate overlays directly when you prefer independent encoder layers. Whenever you send something to the screen while its overlay is switched off, the dashboard offers to switch it on.
Move designs between rigs. Export or import a complete custom overlay, including its layers and uploaded artwork. API layers also have their own smaller presets for copying a configured feed, filters, styles, labels, scrolling, and placement into another design.
Audience games
• Trivia — ask your AI for short questions about where you are (or anything else), keep the good ones in a bank, and air them on a countdown. Chat answers are scored, and a question card and a leaderboard are available as overlays.
• Polls — ask chat a question with numbered choices, written on the overlay or only spoken; the router counts the numbers viewers type and the Poll overlay shows the bars and the winner. Save polls to run again.
• Closest guess — "guess how much this is": a screen grab or a picture of your choice on the card, the answer typed now or kept hidden until Reveal, a timer, the number of winners, closest or without-going-over, reveal by itself when guessing closes, and saved games. The dashboard remembers your last question.
• Emoji meter — nothing to pick: the router counts every emoji chat uses, standard or custom, and the overlay draws an animated bar graph of all of them, biggest first, with a gauge of how hard chat is going. Give it a title if you like.
• Jokes — write one, or have the AI write a batch about a subject or where you are; queue them, then tell the next one on screen, read out loud, or both, with a rating ceiling that a helper cannot raise.
• What am I looking at? — for you, the host. Standing in front of Tower of Terror with the camera on it, one press sends the picture and your position to your AI and gets back the attraction's name and its story to read out, with the option to put it on screen. Keep the answers you like; delete the rest. Reachable from Trivia, the Chat tab's Look button, the Companion tab and a header chip.
Share with a helper makes one link that opens only Trivia, Polls and Jokes, so a friend can run the games while you walk — without your AI key, the overlay builders or the rest of the dashboard. Counting votes, scoring answers, reading guesses and filling the emoji meter need Pro Chat; the cards and overlays work without it.
StreamHelpers Pro
The dashboard is free. Pro is an optional subscription for the parts that need a hosted service.
Pro Chat merges YouTube, Twitch, Kick, Facebook, Discord and Restream.io into one feed for the Chat tab, the chat and featured-message overlays, alerts, celebrations and the games that read chat. StreamHelpers keeps account connections and provider credentials off the router. Live Map publishes your position to a public page your viewers open with one link. Pro also removes the StreamHelpers.com mark from the all-in-one overlay, adds Motion & g-force readouts from a Companion phone, and unlocks the Companion's picture-in-picture layouts, camera talkback and adding a phone from anywhere.
See what each Pro feature does and the Pro guide.
Settings, backups and updates
Everything is configured in the browser. On a new router the dashboard opens Set up your stream, a short guided setup that asks one plain question at a time — what sends the video, where your location comes from, whether to bond, whether OBS is in the middle. After that, Settings holds everything, and every setting is optional: leave one blank and the dashboard hides that tab rather than showing you something broken. Each field carries a note on where to get that credential.
Set a login under Access. Header chips and share links (a whole-dashboard link over Tailscale Funnel, or the helper link for the games) live here too. Backup & restore saves everything — settings, overlay designs, timer and theme-park choices, header chips — as one JSON file with passwords and API keys left out by default, and restores it on this router or the next one. The System update card shows what is installed and what is latest, the release highlights and the full notes, updates with one press, and can tell you when a new version is out. Updates never overwrite your settings.
Documentation and help
The guides live in the community StreamHelpers wiki: the dashboard · going live · overlay control · overlay reference · audience games · Pro Chat · the Companion · the receiver · updating · keeping your rig secure · when an update goes wrong · release history.
Questions, bug reports and feature requests go to the StreamHelpers Discord, where the community answers them and votes on what matters. See how support works.
Keep the dashboard on your LAN or VPN. It can reboot your modem, restart your bond,
and use the streaming credentials you configure, so do not port-forward it to the public internet — use Tailscale, or the
dashboard's own share links, when someone else needs in. Your settings and API keys stay on the router, outside the web root.
Known gaps
The modem controls are GL.iNet-specific: they use /usr/bin/gl_modem, so on other OpenWRT hardware the dashboard can still run but those controls are unavailable. The Magewell Director Mini API is beta and Magewell can change it in a firmware update.
More
README.md ·
wiki ·
release history ·
receiver ·
credits & licences
Provided as-is, with no warranty and no personal support. This dashboard can reboot your
modem, restart your bond and change your encoder mid-broadcast. There is no help desk and no obligation on anyone
to answer a question or fix a bug; help comes from the community in the
Discord
and the
wiki.
The source code is not shared — it is not
open source, not available on request, and that is not up for debate:
run it or don't, but please don't ask.
This is free software by invitation, not an open project taking contributions. You are responsible for securing your installation and for
testing before you rely on it. See the
disclaimer.
