US Navy will replace touchscreen with mechanical controls on its destroyers

Re:US Navy will replace touchscreen with mechanical controls... by heavenlyblue on Sunday August 11, 2019 @08:43PM (#20671533)

What if the metal base of the rotatable knob has a certain rotationaly asymmetric pattern instead of being completely flat?

We would then be able to receive that pattern and understand how the knob is rotated.

What’s the resolution of todays touchscreen?

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Re:US Navy will replace touchscreen with mechanical controls... by ethbro on Sunday August 11, 2019 @09:02PM (#20671621)

It's an interesting thought. You'd want to use a full bandwidth data channel (e.g. Bluetooth) for anything complicated.

But for simple things, if possible without affecting the other parts of the screen, it'd be amazing to have a broadly supported, low bandwidth standard.

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Re:US Navy will replace touchscreen with mechanical controls... by gugagore on Sunday August 11, 2019 @09:49PM (#20671809)

I can't really make sense of the bandwidth (information rate) of a tactile interface. A measure in units of length would make more sense to me.

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Re:US Navy will replace touchscreen with mechanical controls... by ethbro on Monday August 12, 2019 @08:40AM (#20674846)

Any digital control signal effectively has a minimum bandwidth.

This might be as simple as "Here's my encoded position * frequency of sampling", but for a general interface you'd want something adaptable.

What if there were two dials on the control? Two dials and three buttons? One dial, four buttons, and a joystick?

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Re:US Navy will replace touchscreen with mechanical controls... by namibj on Sunday August 11, 2019 @10:19PM (#20671923)

It's enough for knobs of 1 inch spacing or wider, no easy support for fancy geared knobs that coaxially have a rough setting and a fine adjustment.

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