Sinks

Gauge Block

Analog-style needle gauge

# Gauge Block

Description

The Gauge block renders an analog semicircular dial with a rotating needle, showing the instantaneous value of the connected signal relative to a user-defined min/max range. The filled arc grows proportionally with the value and the needle sweeps from −90° (minimum) to +90° (maximum), giving an immediate visual sense of where the signal sits within its operating band.

It is well suited for monitoring slowly varying process variables — temperature, pressure, flow rate, or any signal with a meaningful engineering range — where a quick at-a-glance reading is more useful than a precise numeric readout.

Parameters

minValue

Lower bound of the gauge scale. Values below this are clamped to the minimum position. Default: 0.

maxValue

Upper bound of the gauge scale. Values above this are clamped to the maximum position. Default: 100.

units

Unit label displayed beneath the numeric value in the centre of the dial (e.g. "bar", "rpm", "°C"). Default: "" (no label).

Examples

Monitor reactor temperature

TemperatureSensor → Gauge

Set minValue to 0, maxValue to 200, and units to "°C" to watch the vessel temperature sweep across its safe operating range.

Display normalised PID error

Abs → Gauge

Set minValue to 0 and maxValue to 1 with units as "" to track the absolute normalised error of a control loop at a glance.

Remarks

Pure sink: The Gauge block has no output port. It is a terminal visualisation block and cannot be used mid-chain.
Value clamping: Input values outside [minValue, maxValue] are clamped; the needle does not go beyond the end-stops, so out-of-range conditions are not visually distinguishable from the limit values.
Static readout: The numeric value shown in the dial centre is updated each simulation step but always displays one decimal place regardless of the signal precision.