

Another nice Panic-inspired office dashboard - thesethings
http://jon.oxer.com.au/blog/id/360

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jonoxer
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.

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thesethings
(Aw, so cool you came to this site!) And also cool this involved Arduino.

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jonoxer
Thanks for submitting the story!

There's some more background to the power monitoring stuff here:
<http://www.practicalarduino.com/news/id/441>

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gridspy
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.

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

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icefox
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.

