jonoxer

Thanks for submitting the story!

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

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.