[heisenzombie]

It bears really thinking through the alternative:

So we're going to have some engineers specify suitable digital replacements given the process/environment/safety requirements. We'll procure those (noting that an industrial digital pressure transducer can easily push up towards $10k), schedule a plant shutdown (how much does that cost?), then pay a pipefitter/boilermaker to replace the old gauges with new pressure transmitters (do you need a hot work permit for that? Did you get your engineer to sign that off?). Then, your controls sparky has to find a way to route a drop back to your marshalling cabinet for connection into your fieldbus/HART/modbus/whatever network (do you have one of those?) so that your SCADA system can talk to it (do you have one of those?).

Obviously it's not really an apples-to-apples comparison, but I think the costs involved with making "simple" changes in industrial settings are easy to wildly underestimate.

[fennecfoxy]

I think the thing is: does it need to last 20-30 years between replacements if a robot can easily replace it + they're cheap enough to add redundant ones. Do we really need crazy accuracy even on an industrial level...like this pipe will burst at 200psi so the gauge needs to be accurate to 0.001 psi so we can sound the alarm when it hits 199.999 psi somehow I don't think so.

Dumb silicon is so super cheap now, just look to nfc etc, 1c microcontrollers. We can litter our world with sensors.

Which I would love to see - but I'm also not discounting the usefulness of any robot just being able to read something we can read and vice versa.