Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

Re:Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles by ceejayoz on Monday June 17, 2019 @02:33PM (#20206012)

> A heavily vibrating vehicle which needs to be operated quickly and with 100% reliability by a human operator really should not be operated via a proliferation of touch screens and touch buttons as the images above show.

In fairness to SpaceX, Dragon largely isn't designed to be operated by a human. There's a reason that page calls out stuff like "how warm should the cabin be" as the sort of decisions being made with these touchscreens.

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Re:Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles by pugworthy on Monday June 17, 2019 @05:01PM (#20207352)

To quote the page linked earlier...

> Crew Dragon will be a fully autonomous spacecraft that can also be monitored & controlled by on board astronauts and SpaceX mission control in Hawthorne, CA.

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Re:Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles by yholio on Tuesday June 18, 2019 @03:52AM (#20210538)

I would be very surprised if Dragon did not include the 21st century equivalent of the Apollo 8-ball, manual translation controller and stick.

NASA is a very conservative organization and if there is a lesson to be learned from past near disasters, is how limited is the foresight of mission planners and how infinitely adaptable are the human astronauts.

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Re:Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles by rbanffy on Wednesday June 19, 2019 @06:47AM (#20222213)

It has a stick and a couple buttons for most of the functionality that can be useful to the pilots in case the craft misbehaves. It seems to have rotary input so it can manage rotation and translation.

A lot of the controls in an Apollo were to be used in normal manual operations that are automated (or have no counterpart) in Dragons.

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Re:Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles by m4rtink on Tuesday June 18, 2019 @09:38AM (#20212817)

There are a few physical buttons for the few critical functions you might want to trigger in the boost/reentry phase. The rest is either 1 g or microgravity and a touchscreen should not be a problem.

BTW, not surre if they implemented it in the end, but they planned to handle screen blurring due to vibrations by shifting the screen content based on accelerometer data in real time. A rather clever idea IMHO. :)

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Re:Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles by rbanffy on Wednesday June 19, 2019 @06:50AM (#20222228)

> they planned to handle screen blurring due to vibrations by shifting the screen content based on accelerometer data in real time

IIRC, Orion does that by timing the screen backlight.

If I had a choice between Orion, Starliner or Dragon, I'd go with the Dragon. The spacesuits are much nicer and if I have to die, I'd rather go with style.

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Re:Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles by nradov on Tuesday June 18, 2019 @11:00AM (#20213830)

Perhaps I'm missing something but how could the Dragon capsule automation handle something like the emergency that occurred during the Gemini 8 mission? Without manual control by the astronauts it could have turned into a real disaster.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_8#Emergency

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Re:Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles by ceejayoz on Tuesday June 18, 2019 @11:08AM (#20213915)

Computing and testing has come a long way since the Gemini days. We now have aircraft (particularly military fighters) that are literally uncontrollable without the computers.

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Re:Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles by nradov on Tuesday June 18, 2019 @12:17PM (#20214728)

Those control systems only work within certain preprogrammed constraints. They are generally incapable of handling unexpected situations outside of the design limits.

Computerized fly by wire systems still depend on a pilot in the loop, especially in the case of a mechanical failure.

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Re:Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles by T-A on Wednesday June 19, 2019 @12:46PM (#20224899)

So let’s say the airplane gets damaged, and one of the flight controls is no longer available. A legacy airplane would still try to use that surface because it doesn’t know any better. The F-35 digital flight control systems will say, “That surface isn’t doing much for me anymore, so I’m going to have to compensate by using some other things. Maybe I’ll have to move them a little bit more to get the same effect because the pilot still wants to turn left.”

https://www.airspacemag.com/military-aviation/f-35-faces-mos...

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