Catalyst Console v0.8.0 — Less text, more robot

Less text, more robot

The settings rows stopped lecturing

Every row had a paragraph under it. Fifteen rows carried 403 words of explanation — twenty-seven per
row — which is not a settings panel, it is a manual with controls embedded in it. A row is a label
and a control; where a sentence genuinely earns its place it gets one line, and where it was
explaining the obvious it is gone.

Row prose is 74 words across twelve rows now, down from 366 across fourteen. The longer
reasoning that was worth keeping moved to the section prose, which is read once, rather than sitting
on a row that is read every single time.

CAN devices, as a tree

The sheet said 11 CAN devices and 8 × Kraken X60. That answers a question nobody has. At two in
the morning in a pit the question is which id is on which wire, and whether the device that stopped
answering is on the rio bus or the CANivore.

A robot on FrcCatalyst 1.12 publishes every device with its bus, id and type, and the garage
draws them as a tree — one group per bus, ids down the side, sorted the way you would read a loom.
The count and the by-type inventory are both still there: a count is the right shape for a glance and
this is the right shape for a diagnosis.

The power distribution, as a panel

A list of five channels does not show you that 9 through 19 are empty, and the shape of what is free
is most of what you want when you are adding a mechanism. It is drawn as the board it is now —
every slot, taken ones filled — with the map underneath.

It only appears when the robot published a channel count. A strip sized to whatever happened to be in
use would be inventing the shape of a distribution board nobody told this console about.