Hacker News Reader

Comment by mulmen | Hacker News Reader

In my day job I do data pipeline development and operations. That involves a bunch of AWS services and some custom wrappers we developed in-house. I spend a lot of time clicking around in web interfaces.

Recently I have fantasized about what it would be like to operate my environment with something like the ACE control room.

Need to set a flag on some Spark option? That’s literally a switch. Is something on fire? Look for a flashing red light. Need to send the output of a task to some other process? That’s a knob.

I think about this both in terms of literally making a control panel/room or a web interface equivalent.

A control room seems like something that needs a lot of forethought and deep understanding. How would that requirement along with the difficulty of pushing changes influence the design of a web interface?

Recently Ken obtained and shared some of the Roto-Tellite switches from mission control. Is that the 1960’s version of jQuery?

View on HN

Investing in centralized logging and alerting can give you the raw data for your dashboarding vision. I'd start there.

I already have logs, alerts and dashboards.

I want a control panel. Complete with blinkenlights and switchgear that goes “click” and has satisfying detents.

I believe the current interest in Arduino, Raspberry Pi Pico, Mini SAM, and the like is because of an interest in how things worked when they were simpler and more mechanical. Especially since they allow for easy cross-breeding of modern computing with something more analog on a bread board or pHAT with any sensor configuration you can imagine.

It sounds like you would find some comfort in and around these devices.

I made a little joke project a while back called "Keytarnetes" which used a MIDI controller (in this case a keytar from a Guitar Hero set) to run various actions against a Kubernetes cluster when you pressed the keys. It was really simple to hack together in a night using the mido python library. I basically just had a folder with shell scripts named after the notes and a process that polled for new keypresses and executed the script with the same name when that note that was pressed on the keytar. Maybe something like that could work for you?

You'd love Simulink.

You can forget automation then :)

Why? Apollo was automated. The LEM could land itself. The control room just… controls.

Why can’t my control room have a “backfill” station that takes inputs for begin and end date and dispatches that to the correct system?

> The LEM could land itself

No, really it couldn’t. Someone had to reset all those 1201 alarms while manually hovering it down to a boulder free site

I suggest watching this excellent presentation: https://youtu.be/B1J2RMorJXM.

He goes in to great depth in explaining how the LEM was in fact capable of landing itself.

Automation was widespread in the development and execution of the Apollo program.

I'm not able to check out the video right now, but I certainly will. I enjoy all things related to the Apollo program.

My understanding is that the autopilot in the LEM was very capable of flying the spacecraft, but there wasn't adequate sensor or image processing technology to allow the spacecraft to precisely choose a landing site free of obstructions. The human pilot wasn't necessarily essential for the mechanical act of landing, but was (in the first missions, at least) necessary for selecting a safe landing site.

I believe that is mostly correct. I think you will enjoy the video. It definitely taught me a lot.

It has been a while since I watched the video myself but here is my understanding:

The LEM had a “target” landing point and was fly-by-wire. There were two control modes, one for the descent and rendezvous (~”flight”) and one for landing. Both were fly by wire but one put the LEM in a desired orientation (as defined by astronaut input) and the second for landing.

In the landing configuration the LEM actually was landing itself and Armstrong was actually updating the target with the controls. Aldrin was instrumental in this process to manage literally everything else and calling out information for Armstrong who lined up the target point using special crosshairs on the window.

So in a sense all the LEMs “landed themselves”. Additionally they did have the capability to carry out (but not update) a pre-programmed landing. This was never done in reality but was simulated.

To be serious, the Apollo testing was a combination of manual, semi-automatic, and automatic. You could program tests into the minicomputer and trigger them with a "start" button in the control room. The computer would carry out the steps for the test, check for parameters that were out of bounds, and display these on a CRT in the control room. Meanwhile, you could see other parameters on the gauges and chart recorders. So it was more advanced than you might expect.

It replaced a system where you'd radio a guy at the rocket and tell him to switch things on and off, and he'd tell you what happened. Needless to say, that was pretty unreliable.

No, you need to build a button pushing robot then.

Mechanical switch can be automated, and it is automated in tons of industry, like sound mixer, airplane cockpit, etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com