Before pixels: Modular industrial dashboards

DocJade

There's really so much physicality to interacting with objects that we've lost as we switch to more and more touch screens and capacitive buttons. Also the reassuring "thunk" of a nice chunky button to confirm you've pressed it is just so important to user confidence

Aardwolf

> Don’t you just want to rotate it, no matter what it does? A grandparent's house had light switches that looked kind of like this but black (bakelite). And they are very satisfying, a good amount of resistance while rotating, then click.

slg

I recently watched both the 1974 and 2009 versions of The Taking of Pelham 123 and it really stood out how the industrial designs of their respective eras helped elevate the original[1][2] in comparison to the remake[3][4]. [1] - https://media.doblu.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Taking-of... [2] - https://ilarge.lisimg.com/image/21019979/1118full-the-taking... [3] - https://c8.alamy.com/comp/K3KWM1/the-taking-of-pelham-123-da... [4] - https://press.moviewalker.jp/api/resizeimage/content/main/mv...

greazy

The very cool https://www.astrouxds.com aims to be the pixel version of the physical dashboards. It's a very cool design library. Not related to Astro the templating engine.

jacquesm

>This big industrial switch toggled between day and night. I don’t know if it changed the operation of the system, or is just switched on some sort of a dark mode for the panel itself: I think we can answer that with 'yes, it changed the operation of the system. The indicator next to it is labeled in Amperes and 30 Amps is a lot of current. depending on the driving voltage at 24 V (pretty common for control panels like this one) that's 700W give or take and if it is a line voltage (220 V in poland at the time) that 6.6KW.

motohagiography

Maybe every abstraction is a finite state machine, and we can construct an analog circuit of any of them. I have an opinion about metrics where they are not the data, but the emergent analog signal from a system. The idea of collecting data and deriving metrics from it is absurd when you look at your system as a thing that has inputs and an output and the line for the output goes up or down over time. The beauty of these industrial systems is that the makers understood this principle. The system produces a signal that bears meaning that these interfaces express.

bezko

These are tiny compared to what Hans Zimmer is using: https://synthanatomy.com/2025/10/syntesla-giorgio-iii-a-mons...

apgwoz

Hmm. Is this why rail maps tend to look like circuit traces? It’d kind of make sense for the operator status map to look like the map you hand out, or put in stations. The design is an abstraction good enough for understanding switching status for operators, why not for riders trying to get to Manhattan Beach?

krige

These very distinctly remind me of electric/electronic didactic "toys" from the at least 80s. Plastic cubes, containing a single (usually) circuit component, like switches, resistors, lights, coils, or just wire, with bare metal connectors on relevant sides and a symbol on top. You got a whole bag of them, as well as a gridded board you inserted the cubes into. Could make even usable stuff like simple radios.