Analog Approach to Displaying Data

Lurker McLurker writes " BBC News reports that Ambient Devices, the MIT Media Lab spin-off which brought us the Ambient Orb, have developed a new product, the Ambient Dashboard . The orb changed colour to display information at a glance, for example turning red if the stock market is going down. The dashboard has three displays, similar to speedometers or barometers, to show the information of your choice, from stock market volumes to the pollen count." As a proof of concept, this is neat stuff. However they seem awful pricey.

Hey!

[Temporal Outcast]

The research group I work with here - Information Interfaces Research Group [gatech.edu] - at Georgia Tech works on something quite similar.

Its called the InfoCanvas [gatech.edu] - kinda cool stuff :)

And yes, although its not analog per-se (as in, display-meters and the like), it does show you in gradual gradings. Like the sky-color changing from a hue of blue to red, and the rainbow slowly fading away and the like.

Just thought it might be relevant! :)

you don't need one of them for that

[Uber Banker]

i have a device commected to my computer which has ~2million indicators of colour, such a device could be used to show the state of every item on every stock market the world over, several times over

For Once

[niko9]

this could actually be a useful case mod.

--

Ye Olde Weather Ball

[tverbeek]

a weather beacon that again changes colour to reflect the forecast.

Sounds a lot like the weather ball [grbj.com] that glowed from a tower in downtown Grand Rapids, Mich. in the 60's-80's (and now back up, elsewhere in the city). Pretty intuitive, and just in case you didn't get it, there's a bit of verse to explain it: "Weather ball red, warmer weather ahead / Weather ball blue, colder weather in view / Weather ball green, no change foreseen / Color blinking bright, rain or snow in sight." Same old concept, just a different device.

Bandwidth VU Meters

[jea6]

My boss has always wanted "bandwidth VU meters" to spotcheck resource usage here. Any suggestions? (Other than Google? [google.com])

Re:I know what I'd display

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Actually, I have the coolest CPU load display. It's made with one of these "charge left" check display that comes with some AA battery (you know, you press two poles and it turns yellow). Here's the recipe:

- Get a used battery with a level check gage

- Carefully unwind the wrapper, and cut it to size to recover the gage

- Duct-tape thin electrical wires at the two ends, behind the wrapper. It's tricky to get good contact. Unfortunately, it's not possible to solder then.

- Glue the wire-equipped gage against something : this is important, the display method in the case of these AA batt checkers is thermal ink. If you want it to display something more useful than just "full on" all the time after 5 minutes, you need to glue it on something that sinks the heat from behind.

- Make a small TTL-controlled 1.5V power supply and connect the control line to one of your // port's line.

- Make a small program to control the display by sending a continuous square signal with variable width modulation (variable duty cycle). Wiggling the line only several times per second is okay, the thermal inertia of the display is high enough that any timing will work. It takes a while to calibrate it, as it's not linear.

Mine's glued on the side of my monitor. At a glance, I can see the average CPU load. It's the display itself that does the averaging, due to thermal inertia. I left the wires exposed and the "Duracell" part of the wrapper to increase the geeky looks.

Patents

[Dr. Mojura]

1. 52: Why didn't anyone think of this before?

1. Not sure, feels pretty obvious to us. But we patented it anyway.

Seems to be the trend these days..

Anyways, looks pretty cool. There's just something about analog gauges that's so asthetically pleasing. Like someone mentioned before in the post about analog watches still being used, It's probably that an analog gauge is highly visual, whereas digital is more of numeric processing. Would anyone rather have a digital tach in their car than an analog one? I know I wouldn't.

I've thought of this.

[pclminion]

I've thought of doing this, except with sound instead of light. Instead of a "system monitor" that takes up a large chunk of my screen real estate, what I really want is a monitor that uses sound to tell me what's going on.

System load could be signified by clicks, with the frequency of the clicks increasing as system load increases.

Each new TCP connection would make some kind of "boing" sound, with the frequency again depending on what service I'm connecting to (http would go boioioioing, ssh would go beeeerooooing, etc)

Memory usage would be signified by a double-beep, "beeee-beep," with the "duty cycle" indicating the percentage of memory usage. Two short beeps means lots of memory is free. One long "beeeep" means I'm swapping to disk.

Disk seek activity would be a series of random bleeping sounds, like Brownian motion across frequencies.

Basically, I would like an irritating cacophony of sound to emanate from my workstation, which only I can interpret :-)

Great! Technology from 1949...

[WebGangsta]

Minneapolis bank NORWEST had these for years, used to give locals a quick idea of the weather:

• Red = Warmer
• White = Colder
• Green = No Change
• Blinking = Precipitation coming

It was simple, but it worked.

A history of the Weatherball [umn.edu]

I haven't been by that area for years, so I don't know if the Weatherballs are still there or not. Bueller?

Re:DIY Solution: Real one

[t0qer]

I know nothing about tcp/ip, but my electronics and basic are pretty good...

You'll need
3 analog dials
3 triacs
a parrelel port.

i'll just provide a link [aaroncake.net] with some pertanent info. Basically wire up the triacs to the voltmeters (to isolate and backflow current from the VU meter's coils) and the other end to any data line on the parrellel port. Strobe the data line till your VU meters needle is pointing where you want it to go.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

I wanna hear, not see

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

Having to look at a display is an active process that I may fail to do if I'm busy with something else. I want to hear analog data.

Sorry, I'm just reminiscing about the old days when I had a micro with some of the address lines insufficiently isolated from the speaker so I could actually hear how busy the CPU was. Just a low level hum but enough to signal when your code was caught in a loop and far more informative that a CPU meter because in a crude way you could actually hear the structure of the kinds of loops being executed. Maybe I should write something like this myself but I'm not sure how to poll the state of the PC register, say, under any modern OS. Each process could have a sound channel - proportional in volume to the CPU time it's using - and I'd be instantly alerted any time something weird was going on.

Re:unfortunatly

[Midnight Thunder]

the one monitoring their web traffic just exploded.

Actually that would be rather cool in the operations room. No longer would you need to use a screen to see that your site is dying ( well, to confirm it you would ). Just put it on your desk and work on something else.

We like our Orb

[mahlen]

My development group at Shopping.com [shopping.com] uses an Ambient Orb to reflect the status of the hourly build/test cycle. Even though the continuous build process sends out email and has a web page to indicate what the status is, it's still nice to have a physical artifact of the system, and certainly hammers home that The Build Must Keep Working. When you look at it and it's green, you feel just a little bit OK, and when it's red, you get a little anxious, and really want to make sure it gets fixed.

I only wish that the Orb was more responsive to the data we send it; occasionally it can take 20 minutes for it to update. But overall, we like it. Do not anger the Orb!

mahlen

Re:Hey!

[dschuetz]

Its called the InfoCanvas - kinda cool stuff :)

For me, this is the "killer app" for digital paper.

On my desktop(s), at various times, I've typically had:

• Current month's calendar
  
• Clock
  
• Local weather
  
• IM buddy list
  
• three webcams (Rothenberg, Chesapeake Bay, and Skyline Drive -- places I'd rather be than at work)
  
• Current stock prices for some key stocks
  
• Department in/out board
  
• Recent comic strips

But, of course, most of the time I can't *see* any of those, because they're covered up with real work. Sure, I could add a third (or fourth) monitor, but then that screen would just be filled with other windows.

If I could have an 11x17, nicely framed piece of color electronic paper on my office wall, then I could move all this slow-update information to that. The information would still be handy, but because of the properties of the display, I wouldn't be tempted to use it as a "live" desktop monitor. Also, having a large space, nicely framed and hung on the wall, would encourage me to pick nice-looking clocks and calendars and stuff, not the ugly windows that stick on the background, so it'd be pleasing as well as informative.

How about it? Please tell me you've been thinking on exactly the same lines. I've been asking for this for THREE YEARS, which is an eternity in the digital marketplace. I'm tired of waiting. :)