Every single car - except Tesla - does a bad job implementing touchscreens, from my experience. They are generally a pain to use and unintuitive.
Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls
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Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls
#742Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In many of the newer systems, all those physical dials and switches are just inputs to the computer system which ultimately decides to do what the user is requesting. Even so, a program for processing a switch or dial can be really short and simple. You can print it out on a sheet and check and double check every line of code for to make sure it's correct and all possibilities are accounted for. A program handling…
Mechanical switches and rotary controls require debouncing which is no picnic. I can 100% tell from your comment that you've never had to work with one. It's less science than black magic to avoid double presses or missed presses.
I've done a bunch of debouncing switch inputs, keypad, keyboard, rotory switches. And wrote some test code for capcitive touch display (long time ago)
It's the kinda problem that will tend to bite you in the butt if you aren't aware of all the gotchas. Difficulty is they are application specific. But I wouldn't describe the code as particularly complicated.
Most of this stuff a crusty old neckbeard embedded programmer can do half drunk on Friday afternoon.
Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls
#743Earlier quoted context omitted.
This comment is off-topic: the article is about physical buttons for non-safety-critical systems. E.g. the article explicitly mentions climate control.
Climate control is something you will want to adjust while driving, so it should be as eyes-free as possible once the basics have been acquired. I can’t think of a car I’ve driven where the climate control was not physical though, that seems pretty insane.
Will you though? You have a temperature you're comfortable at. Set climate control to that and let the software manage the air.
Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls
#744This link is better: https://jalopnik.com/honda-follows-mazda-by-ditching-some-to...
Autocar requires you to disable your ad blocker in order to view the website. Jalopnik does not, and does not even show a GDPR cookie popup.
Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls
#745Look 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…
Not to mention, touchscreens really disadvantage the visually impaired.
Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls
#746Mazda did it first :) The new Mazda 3 2019 model (launched in october 2018) has no tuchscreen control.
Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls
#747Earlier 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…
If anyone else is wondering what debouncing is: https://my.eng.utah.edu/~cs5780/debouncing.pdf
Haha, this is actually a remarkably funny read with some grizzled, hard-won bits of wisdom sprinkled in.
"It’s surprising how many of those derelicts hanging out at the waterfront bars pick an almost random time constant. “The boys ‘n me, we jest figger sumpin like 5 msec”. Shortchanging a real analysis starts even a clean-cut engineer down the slippery slope to the wastrel vagabond’s life."
Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls
#748Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting link. Can anyone explain why a car needs so much code?
I mean ... we all know a car does not need that much code
I guess in cars they use less (public) librarys because of safety. So there own libs are included in LOC. If you look at a modern Microsoft licence, they list tons of used open source libs in there products. I guess if you include all the librarys, the LOC number should be much higher.
Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls
#749The elegance of the Apple Watch Series 5 crown with haptic feedback for scroll function.
Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls
#750I could only image being blind and having to navigate a world that is completely flat. Knobs and controls add something to grab onto. to me it's also safer, if I'm driving and want to change the radio channel, i can feel for the knob without having to take my eyes off the road. i can't do this with a flat, touchscreen display and I also find that voice command work most times but, on the time they don't, i get frustrated and that's not good when driving either as it can cause road rage.
innovation is wonderful, however sometimes the old ways win out.