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Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

autocar.co.uk

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Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#681

Post by systemtest »

lazyjones wrote: post #326
samizdis wrote: post #8

Eminently sensible call by Honda. Knobs, dials and switches work well and do not demand that a driver takes their eyes off the road. I suppose that voice controls would be a reasonably safe tech option, but probably not cost-effective.

Voice control sucks IMO, even though a lot of people now grow up with Alexa and similar and adapt to the technology. Why does it suck, just like some "smart" buttons? Because it's not obvious what it can do. You have to learn the vocabulary it understands and its other limitations (tone etc.). For example, I tried to get my Tesla to text one of my contacts recently and failed. I didn't know whether it just didn't und…

In a car it's even worse because you have to tell everyone in the car (or on the phone) to stop talking, give your command, wait for the confirmation and then everyone can continue talking.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#683

Post by collyw »

hnarn wrote: post #138

Look at the cockpit of any modern airliner and you will see screens, but they are never interactive. There are hardware buttons, dials and lights all over the place. A tactile interface is both more obvious, sturdy and more stable, and therefore safer. The problem that touch interfaces solve, ever since the advent of the first smart phone, is that the interface is now dynamic. You can change it without having to repl…

Indeed when phones started moving over to touchscreen dial pads i always thought it was a step backward usability wise. I had one phone where I couldn't hang up calls easily as you needed to swipe in a particular direction and a number of my calls went though a VOIP number so that had a different way of hanging up. Same with whatsapp calls now answering and hanging up is different from a normal call. It's a real shitshow.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#684

Post by nswest23 »

collyw wrote: post #683
hnarn wrote: post #138

Look at the cockpit of any modern airliner and you will see screens, but they are never interactive. There are hardware buttons, dials and lights all over the place. A tactile interface is both more obvious, sturdy and more stable, and therefore safer. The problem that touch interfaces solve, ever since the advent of the first smart phone, is that the interface is now dynamic. You can change it without having to repl…

Indeed when phones started moving over to touchscreen dial pads i always thought it was a step backward usability wise. I had one phone where I couldn't hang up calls easily as you needed to swipe in a particular direction and a number of my calls went though a VOIP number so that had a different way of hanging up. Same with whatsapp calls now answering and hanging up is different from a normal call. It's a real shit…

Touchscreens on phones are great for usability! There are so many things that are enabled by touchscreens that you couldn't do with an array of physical buttons or whatever. OP's comment was specifically for mission critical hardware where safety is paramount.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#685

Post by Erlich_Bachman »

criley2 wrote: post #423
redis_mlc wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's OK to look at a screen for 10 seconds Not really. Pilots are supposed to be visually looking for traffic 90% of the time, and the rest scanning instruments. So to be heads-down for 10 seconds, the non-flying pilot would have to arrange that with the flying pilot.

Under VFR sure, obviously under IFR they are looking at the instruments as much as 100% of the time, including the instruments which inform them if planes are nearby, and instruments which inform them of their location, direction, and all of the variables therein. It would be madness if pilots had to rely solely on their eyes to locate other planes nearby. There is thankfully instruments which do this as well.

Or, you know just flying the autopilot, which many do like 90% of the flying time...

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#686

Post by collyw »

mgkimsal wrote: post #670
ijidak wrote: post #630

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Billions? That sounds like a vast overestimate, no? Are there any programs that approach a billion lines of code?

I'd think a few npm dependencies should do the trick ;) a quick search brought up https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/the-biggest-codebases-in-h... which reports google's codebase is around 2 billion LOC. MS Office comes in close to 50 million, for example. Not sure how accurate these are, but seem to give some rough comparisons, and yeah, not too many things are billions of LOC.

I wouldn't be surprised, the amount of crap that gets downloaded for a simple react app is incredible.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#687

Post by AdrianB1 »

robocat wrote: post #435
squarefoot wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Touch screens add multiple points of failure to a device that, if properly built, would last decades. A single glitch in a software driving a screen could render useless all touch inputs displayed on it, information loss aside. I'm all for mechanical switches everywhere. As for potentiometers, sliders etc, we already have optical and mechanical encoders that hardly fail, or if/when they do, it happens gracefully leav…

Multiple physical knobs and buttons add multiple points of failure: moving parts fail and even worse, they often fail intermittently. We all have that experience. Even optical encoders fail (I’ve had one fail on an engine, and obviously consumer mice, or the connectors fail). A modern touch screen is superbly reliable because it has no moving parts, and it can be tested. The (consumer grade) iPad touchscreen is very…

Multiple physical knows will never fail all at once like a single touchscreen can. As a small plane pilot I prefer to have as many independent systems as possible; I use an iPad for instruments and navigation, but every single function is duplicated by a separate instrument, so if I lose the iPad for any reason I have the instruments in the cockpit. I had several incidents where single components failed, but I was able to safely land the plane every time. Hardware failures are as much as a problem as software failures and dual-redundant critical systems are far better than multi-functional devices.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#688

Post by collyw »

nswest23 wrote: post #684
collyw wrote: post #683

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed when phones started moving over to touchscreen dial pads i always thought it was a step backward usability wise. I had one phone where I couldn't hang up calls easily as you needed to swipe in a particular direction and a number of my calls went though a VOIP number so that had a different way of hanging up. Same with whatsapp calls now answering and hanging up is different from a normal call. It's a real shit…

Touchscreens on phones are great for usability! There are so many things that are enabled by touchscreens that you couldn't do with an array of physical buttons or whatever. OP's comment was specifically for mission critical hardware where safety is paramount.

For making a phonecall they are crap in comparison to buttons.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#689

Post by AdrianB1 »

est31 wrote: post #262
CivBase wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work for an avionics manufacturer and I can assure you most of our upcoming comercial systems (and even a healthy portion of government ones) feature touch screen inputs.

In airplanes touchscreens are less of an issue than in cars. In cars you have to have a hand on the wheel 99% of the time, and your gaze on the road. You can't afford interaction with a complicated non-haptic touch screen menu. In airplanes it's different. Here, outside of takeoff and landing, it's OK to look at a screen for 10 seconds while interacting with it with a hand.

Most planes in the world are not the big airliners, but smaller planes where single pilot operation is very frequent and many planes do not have a complex autopilot, but usually a 2 or 3 axis stabilization. Also in turbulent weather looking for 10 seconds at a screen can induce motion sickness even to seasoned pilots. We have to do that for map checks and calculations, not a pleasure.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#690

Post by whatshisface »

crististm wrote: post #658
travisgriggs wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've done a lot of programming for hardware switches and such then? I do some. And the last device we built, we still fight with a simple rotary switch. You have to do things like debounce inputs that seem like obvious binary switches. Getting the debounce windowing right can be just as "guessy". And guess what the highest point of failure on said device is. That selector switch. Had similar experience with buttons…

Are you debouncing on tactile or is the hardware doing it for you?

In an ancient textbook I was reading, they were explaining how to debounce with transistors, capacitors and resistors - so at one time in history debounce was done in hardware.
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