Open MCT – Open-Source Mission Control Software | Hacker News Reader

Open MCT – Open-Source Mission Control Software

nasa.github.io

170 pointstaylorbuley14 comments

I think the biggest takeaway from this is diving into their research about the human consumption of a lot of information (UX, if you will).

I know NASA and the Air Force spent a lot of time seeing how humans pilots digested information under stressful conditions etc., which basically gave us the modern aircraft cockpit layout (and the fairly standard arrangement of the 6 critical instruments that are used in all small aircraft today).

I wonder (and hope) that this research also extended to the arrangement of critical data on a dashboard so that maximum information could be gleaned with as little eye (or mouse) movement as possible.

Could I use this for a personal dashboard? It's meant to track telemetry, so that would include my walking routes, right? ;) Maybe I could also load up my todo list. I know, overkill, but it might be a huge ego thing to throw up a NASA developed Mission Control app on a huge monitor to track personal stuff. And each morning I could put on my headset and do a countdown to getting started for the day.

"Ground control to ground control, mission launch in 10"

It is pretty easy to plug in your own telemetry. I recently made some data from our hackerspace (electricity consumption, whether the hackerspace bar is open, etc) show up in OpenMCT:

https://github.com/c-base/cbeam-telemetry-server

I could see this being adapted as a good v2 for http://riemann.io/dashboard.html ;

Obviously there are lots of dashboards in the world, but while there are substantial differences in UX (OpenMCT seems more approachable whereas riemann dash is very simple & "efficient" over a tall learning curve), the core "feel" of nestable / composable realtime data widgets between these two is noticeably more similar than either vis-a-vis any other relevant project I've played with.

I'm so happy that NASA has stopped using that weird license and just seems to be using Apache v2 for everything. I still don't quite get why there's a license at all for US government work, but there really is nothing objectionable about a standard free license like Apache.

Moving away from AngularJS to reduce dependencies, and also moving away from declarative JSON based configuration to more a function call based system...

Well this is interesting news indeed. The description also makes me wonder if they are aiming to use Crossbar.io, time will tell I suppose.

Interesting. Where do you see the plan?

https://github.com/nasa/openmct (under section: New API)

Or here...which has some more links: https://nasa.github.io/openmct/getting-started/

Honestly, I'm thinking to myself, in what part of my day to day can I use mission control software....hmmm....grocery lists?! I really want to use this but can't find a problem for it.

Pretty cool but I'm wondering if they are releasing the back-end as well?

The use of white backgrounds with blue text is a major UI error. Blue text is known to be more difficult to read due to fewer blue cones in the retina. Otherwise this looks pretty interesting.

So who talks to who. I noticed in the picture that they have headphones on. Is it one party line?

As a safety measure I hope that the `launchMissiles` function evaluates in the `IO` monad. </joke>

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