What makes one work in a real kitchen
- Readable from a metre away in a hot, busy room, and pressable with the side of a thumb.
- Items, not just orders. A thali and a naan are made by different people at different stations and finish at different times.
- Stations — tandoor, curry, cold, or halwai, namkeen, packing — each seeing its own work.
- Ages that are always right, so the oldest order is obvious.
- Survives a bad connection — a tablet on kitchen Wi-Fi that silently stops updating shows yesterday's orders all night.
Example
At 1:15 pm a thali and two naan arrive on the screen. The curry station marks the thali "cooking"; the tandoor marks the naan "ready" at 1:22. The order turns ready only when the thali is ready too — and the counter sees it the moment it does.
How Nivasik handles it
- A kitchen screen by station, item by item: queued, cooking, ready, served — plus one step back, for a recall.
- The docket is ready when every live item is, worked out on the server, so the kitchen touches one thing.
- Stations are free text, so each kitchen names its own.
- One request per refresh for the whole board; live updates, with a 30-second check behind them in case the connection drops.
- No animation anywhere on it: the ages tick in place rather than redrawing the screen.