ShackLink Architecture

Seven interactive plates covering the whole station, from the antenna to the rendered pixel, and back out to RF. Hover a block to trace what it wires to, click it for the reasoning behind it, and print any of them at poster size.

Interactive Print to A0 Light & dark Vector export

How to read them

Every plate uses the same engine, the same palette and the same interactions.

Trace a path

Hover any block and everything it does not touch fades out, leaving the block, its wires and its neighbours. Hovering a wire highlights both ends. It is the fastest way to answer “where does this actually go?”.

Get the reasoning

Click a block or a pipe for a side panel with the design rationale, the measured numbers, and the things that were tried and reverted. The wire list at the bottom of the panel is clickable, so you can walk a chain block by block.

Filter and search

The layer chips under each plate hide and show whole flows: I/Q, audio, spectrum, control, transmit, network. The search box dims everything that does not match, which is handy when you know a name but not where it lives.

Print it big

Pick a paper size in the toolbar and print. The chrome disappears, the plate fills the sheet, and the title, legend and footer are baked into the drawing itself, so a printed sheet stands alone. SVG exports the raw vector for a print shop.

wheel zoom drag pan F fit Esc close panel

A note on ink

The plates are drawn dark because that is the application's own palette, and dark reads well on a projector or a screen. For paper, the Light toggle in the toolbar flips the whole thing to a white-background variant with darkened accents: same drawing, a small fraction of the ink. Printing follows whichever theme is on screen, so choose before you print.

Colour means subsystem

One palette across all seven plates, so a block's colour tells you what kind of thing it is before you read it.

Where this came from

Nothing here is invented. Each plate is drawn from the design documents in docs/, and the detail panels quote the decisions and measurements recorded there.