4 ms·

Another nice Panic-inspired office dashboard

8 points by thesethings 17y ago

gridspy 17y ago
You should use GridSpy for the power monitoring ;) How much did the power monitoring cost? Also, the background on the graph makes it practically unreadable. You should consider bright lines on a black background.
- thesethings 17y ago
  I actually submitted this on behalf of the person who wrote the blog post, and do not know him personally :(.
icefox 17y ago
Two words: Bigger fonts. There is easily room for bigger fonts on those and the photo was only ten feet away and already some words are too little and the graph is nearly useless. When I was making my own dashboard I kept making the fonts bigger and bigger. Because I made it on a screen that was a foot away from my eyes it took me a little while to figure out just how big the fonts how to be to be read from far away and bigger way always better.
jonoxer 17y ago
Other than the numbers, the font size isn't terribly important: after you've seen it a few times you don't need to read the labels anymore and it's just the numbers and the size of the bars that matter. I made the numbers huge and they're very easy to read even from quite some distance away, and once you know that the top yellow bar is tasks in the "Brillianz" category you don't need to keep reading the label. The power monitoring thing is something we created internally. It uses current clamps and Arduinos to push data into a web service. You're right that the graph is more pretty than functional, but it wasn't intended for wall-size display. Most people access it on their desktop and it's quite legible in that context, and it just seemed a handy thing to stick up on the status screen.
- thesethings 17y ago
  (Aw, so cool you came to this site!) And also cool this involved Arduino.
  - jonoxer 17y ago
    Thanks for submitting the story! There's some more background to the power monitoring stuff here: http://www.practicalarduino.com/news/id/441 http://www.practicalarduino.com/news/id/441

8 points by thesethings 17y ago

You should use GridSpy for the power monitoring ;) How much did the power monitoring cost? Also, the background on the graph makes it practically unreadable. You should consider bright lines on a black background.

thesethings 17y ago
I actually submitted this on behalf of the person who wrote the blog post, and do not know him personally :(.

icefox 17y ago

Two words: Bigger fonts. There is easily room for bigger fonts on those and the photo was only ten feet away and already some words are too little and the graph is nearly useless. When I was making my own dashboard I kept making the fonts bigger and bigger. Because I made it on a screen that was a foot away from my eyes it took me a little while to figure out just how big the fonts how to be to be read from far away and bigger way always better.

jonoxer 17y ago

Other than the numbers, the font size isn't terribly important: after you've seen it a few times you don't need to read the labels anymore and it's just the numbers and the size of the bars that matter. I made the numbers huge and they're very easy to read even from quite some distance away, and once you know that the top yellow bar is tasks in the "Brillianz" category you don't need to keep reading the label. The power monitoring thing is something we created internally. It uses current clamps and Arduinos to push data into a web service. You're right that the graph is more pretty than functional, but it wasn't intended for wall-size display. Most people access it on their desktop and it's quite legible in that context, and it just seemed a handy thing to stick up on the status screen.

thesethings 17y ago
(Aw, so cool you came to this site!) And also cool this involved Arduino.
- jonoxer 17y ago
  Thanks for submitting the story! There's some more background to the power monitoring stuff here: http://www.practicalarduino.com/news/id/441 http://www.practicalarduino.com/news/id/441