The Pocket-Sized Panel Built to Simplify Your Workbench

There is a steady stream of information coming our way all day, every day. On the one hand, this is a good thing. It keeps us informed and helps us make better decisions. But there is another side to it as well. We are so overloaded with information that we simply can’t take it all in. Important data points are missed in a massive sea of background noise.

Scott McLeslie recently created a device called Scottina that is meant to cut through this noise without ignoring important information. Rather than replacing the diagnostic tools engineers already use, Scottina acts as a purpose-built front panel that surfaces only the controls and information needed for the task at hand. Based on a Raspberry Pi 5 and a 3.5-inch touchscreen, the pocket-sized device boots directly into a tap-driven interface, eliminating the need to connect a monitor, keyboard, or mouse just to perform routine diagnostics.

Focusing on the 10% that matters

Scottina occupies the middle ground between a command-line interface and a full desktop application. Many engineering tools have dozens of menus, configuration options, and advanced features, but during everyday debugging, users often need only a couple of buttons and a handful of live values. Scottina strips away the remaining 90% of the interface, presenting only the functions required to answer the question in front of you.

The always-available applications cover a wide range of common development tasks. There are tools for LAN diagnostics, Wi-Fi management, Raspberry Pi health monitoring, conversion tables, system settings, and a built-in Pomodoro timer. The interface also displays the Raspberry Pi's IP address in the header, making it easy to transition to an SSH session when deeper access is needed.

Dynamic modular expansion

The device has a hot-plug architecture for quick expansion. As compatible USB peripherals are connected, the interface automatically exposes additional diagnostic screens. These include CAN bus monitoring with bitrate autodetection and live frame statistics, NMEA 2000 protocol decoding, RTL-SDR spectrum analysis and rtl_433 device identification, passive Wi-Fi monitoring, I2C bus scanning, USB serial monitoring, logic analyzer support through sigrok, GPS status, and file management for exporting captured logs and sharing decode tables. When the hardware is disconnected, those screens disappear from the interface.

Scottina also serves as a lightweight launcher for larger engineering applications. Instead of opening a browser and remembering which port a service is running on, users can start applications such as Kismet, Node-RED, AIS-catcher, and Signal K directly from the touchscreen. Scottina verifies that each application is actually running before displaying its URL and port number, providing a quick jumping-off point for more advanced workflows on another device.

Purpose-built for defense, not offense

Although Scottina incorporates networking utilities, software-defined radio support, and packet capture tools, it is designed purely as a diagnostics platform, not an offensive security device. Network scans are constrained to predefined diagnostic modes, Wi-Fi monitoring is passive, and the RTL-SDR functionality is receive-only. The goal is not to add another multitool to the workbench, but to make the trusted tools already sitting there faster and easier to use.

The entire project has been released under a permissive MIT License, and everything has been made available in a GitHub repository.