Yeah processing switch and button and encoder data manually is terrible. Once you install a library to wrap this hardware device in a sane process, how different is that than getting an x/y pixel coordinate from a touchscreen? Touch technology is incredibly reliable. I touch my phone probably 5k times a day or more and I don’t have touch failures, and I carry it around with me and get debris on it and drop it off of tables and all that too. I would argue that a touch interface is one of the most reliable from a hardware standpoint despite not being tactile.

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."

Pressure / proximity info is just as noisy and requires its own version of denouncing and x/y jitter handling on top. (Is it a click/drag/hovering over?) My partner can't even stop accidentally registering right-clicks on her laptop touchpad, which should be a really polished experience these days.

I'm not sure I buy touchscreens ever being simpler to handle. (or even in the similar range - they're strictly harder)

Even modern AAA computer games sometimes miss mouse clicks, because they foolishly poll for transitions of the button up/down state in the main loop, for each frame they render, instead of properly tracking the OS event queue.

It's a very common (and lazy) way of programming games (and other more mission-critical apps): naively polling the input device state in the main simulation or rendering loop, instead of actually responding to each and every queued operating system event like mouse clicks.

It's entirely possible to get multiple mouse down/move/up/click events per render frame, if the system has frozen or stalled for any reason (which happens all the time in the real world). But polling just can't deal with that, so it sometimes ignores legitimate user input (often at a critical time, when other things are happening).

So it's still unfortunately quite common for many apps to sometimes miss quick mouse clicks or screen touches, just because the system freezes up for an instant or lags behind (like when the CPU overheats and the fan turns on madly and SpeedStep clocks the CPU waaaay down, or even the web browser opens up another tab, or anything else blocks the user interface thread), and it just doesn't notice the quick down/up mouse button transition that it would have known about if it were actually tracking operating system events instead of polling.

I had a microwave that used a digital knob that was completely screwed up, from a debouncing perspective. You would turn the knob to try and add 30 seconds to the time and it would stutter between 5-10 seconds for a bit and then shoot up to 3 minutes and then you’d try to drop it down to 30 seconds and end up stuck between 1-2 minutes. It was infuriating! The old mechanical microwave dials were way more reliable than that piece of junk!

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.

In my own brief stint in (non-critical) hardware development, all debouncing was done manually in software.

It all depends on application.... and perspective...

Hardware debouncing works well for most applications but may not be financially rewarding at scale. With time and effort software debouncing can render sometimes better/good or good enough results as hardware..

Remember the saying, "When all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail..."