Speaking of Rotary switches in multimeters. . . I found a Multimeter that could do everything. I mean measuring lux, audio, temperature, capacitance (basic, not real LRC) and I loved it! got for a great price too second hand. One day we were having trouble with our power experiencing Brown Outs, so we setup the mulitmeter to check out the line and left it there (the AC socket) for a while to monitor it. The next day the thing had obviously turned itself off and I needed to use it. So in order for me to turn it on again, I had to rotate the rotary switch through ALL the other functions. Silly me, I forgot its sitting on Live AC. and well... a PCB track was blown straight off and its now ruined...
Kek5kopF Like novice students look up how much current the LED needs in a datasheet. They see something like 20 mA max. Then they select a resistor or current source that meets that 20 mA level!
At the University, I sometimes use the Agilent DSO3062A with USB Host. It can save waveforms on a USB drive, but you can't open them with the provided software, so you have to open the waveform again with the scope, connect the scope via the USB slave to the PC, and download the waveform. That just doesn't make sense! The information is on the USB drive in a single file!
I know nothing about engineering, I am a Marketing Major and work in Marketing & Sales at Techmaster (calibration laboratory that also sales fluke, besides other brands..) I must say I love your videos, they make me understand "this world" a little bit better.... keep up the good work!!
Speaking of blue LEDs - this video inspired me to finally take apart the el cheapo 19inch TV in our bedroom and remove the high intensity blue 'standby' panel LED which used to light the while room when you finished watching TV at night. Perhaps I've got it wrong though and it was actually a safetly feature to keep me awake incase its dodgy internal power supply burst into flames overnight!
My 2010 Chevy Equinox has a USB port for the sound system. I have a thumbdrive with my music collection on it plugged into the audio system. When you start the car it takes a couple minutes to create an index of the mp3 files. That's OK, but in the meantime the default mode is to start playing the first tune on the drive (alphabetically) so that every time you restart the car it plays the same tune! You can't change it until it has finished indexing. Then after it has indexed all the tunes you have to dig into the menu options and either select the tune you want or set it to random play. When you start the car it ought to go back to wherever you were in the index and in whatever search mode you were in when the car was shutoff or simply default to random play. To get around this maddening feature I put a mp3 recording in the front (alphabetically) with seascape sounds which is more or less white noise but far less annoying than hearing the same tune a thousand times a year.
I am a composer with a recording studio full of what is considered to be professional equipment. It seems almost everything electronic these days, both hardware and software, all come with glitches, flaws, bugs, poor layout/design, useless functions, incompatibilities, conflicts, etc... of some kind or another. Worst part is that it seems that people have come to accept that nothing works perfect and just live with that acceptance like it's the norm. They still buy it, find workarounds and wait for the next version to hit the market, which is usually not much better. It's ridiculous. Drives me crazy when I spend a couple grand on a new piece of gear that is popular seller, has 5 star reviews and find out afterward from the manufacturer that it has known issues. Product technology is not advancing, only changing, and quality and reliability has become a thing of the past.
Hey, I live and study in Austria. The public train transport (ÖBB) has these really useful ticket machines. They work very well (including the touchscreen) they are quickn and they're even mounted on different heights in order to enable people of any stature to comfortably purchase their ticket. There is one thing though: up until last year there where no QWERTY (german QWERTZ) keyboards on them to enter the station you will be traveling to. So the letters where sorted alphabetically on the screen. Now who in the world would possibly think that an alphabetic keyboard would be easyer to use than the one you can find on any Computer, Laptop and even Typewriter?? Fortunately they heard the call and now you can change the Keyboard layout.
A lot of products have small buttons or cinch plugs or anything on the outside. That's all fine, but they're usually mounted fairly weak on the circuitboard. So after a couple hundred button presses, it just snaps off the circuit board (or bends) and the button disappears inside the appliance. The device still functions fine, it's the buttons that aren't properly supported on the inside. I've seen this so many times, makes me wonder if they do it on purpose.
I can't agree more on the blue LEDs. It seems there's an unwritten law forbidding to use other colors (or less intensity) for power on indicators. One thing on Casio calculators: Why on earth did they decide to put Pi and Exp on the same freeking button?! These keys are vital to an electronics engineer. They should be both accessible without shifting. But then again, the HYP-Key is of course muuuch more important than these two...
Designed obsolesence, digital cables (??), auto power off, 4 inch woofers, directional patch cables (come-on), break in periods, tube superiority, phono circuitry removed (Bluetooth added), all the new audio gear, Audio-Grade capaciators, coils, and resistors, AC power conditioners, speaker wire elevated on dixie cups, . . . . cell phones. The Navy can't even fire their weapons if the computers go out !!!!!
HUGE peeve. I work in a data center every day. Why are there no universal standards on power cable 'clips' to hold them into their receptacles? This is the MOST important cable you have to plug in, and most often all it takes is a very light tug from an errant rack door or misstep to kill the power supply to any piece of equipment! Preposterous! Some brands have been better about shipping their own brackets for power cables on servers and racks more recently. Come on! It is 2010!
Garmin GPS - Charges with a mini-B USB charge - plugging there's in and everything operates fine, plug a generic on in and you can't use the GPS. It will still charge, but it won't let you access the GPS functionality. Found this out on a trip in which I grabbed the first mini-B cigarette lighter adapter out of my car along with the GPS unit going on a family trip. Of course I figure it out in the middle of nowhere - battery running down - after I decide to fish the adapter out of my bag.
Dell laptops: Two things. First, having to flip the lid up to access the external volume controls. This is ridiculous, if you are going to put a button on the case for volume, it should always be accessible. Related: bright laptop LEDs to light up my room when it is dark -- unnecessary! This all relates to keeping the laptop on the nightstand and using it as sleeping music and/or alarm clock. So I just use black electrical tape on all LEDs now =)
I was shooting at an event last night with my "new" Pentax K-7 (which I generally am pretty happy with). I decide to use one of my old lenses (50mm, f1.9, due to low light) that is fully manual (no AF and only manual aperture). But then the camera "forces" aperture-priority (Av) in all modes (exc. Manual). WHY? It's ok for most modes (as P, TV etc), as the camera can't set the aperture automatically. But to force Av in TAv-mode (you set time and ap., it sets ISO) is not ok. [...]
The reason why you lose the info when the display flips is (probably) because the inverter is _before_ the graphics generator in the circuitry. That means that, to display the graphics when the screen is "upside down", they would have to create a whole new function to draw them with the new orientation, and (assuming that's a touch screen) also to read the touch coordinates upside down. A better design (obviously) would have been to code / connect the screen flipper as the last step, and make it flip the finished image (video + graphics) and flip the touch coordinates before feeding them back to the input handler. They're probably using some flip function in the video encoder chip itself, instead of adding a flip function to the display controller (and therefore saving a few cents). That's the only reason I can think of to design it in such a dumb way.
I seen the post by TheInternetwatcher and I have a story that rivals it. A few years ago, when I bought my laptop, I also purchased a cheap Logitech wireless mouse. I think I spent like $10US on it. It has been through the ringer, tortured, abused, dropped, even submerged in water, and it STILL WORKS! Recently I bought a newer higher end mouse and used it for a couple of days. I quickly found out that the laser would bounce off any surface and make my pointer wander aimlessly across the screen.
more of those annoying hi-power blue led's in hdd enclosures... And one of the BIGGEST fails i encountered on computers: I got my sister for her birthday a 2 gig ram module for her netbook, but i wasnt able to install it because the manufacturer of the board decided to solder the ram chips DIRECTLY on to the board instead of just using a socketed module, like everyone else does!
Hey! You just don't get it! That kind of dedicated keys on a calc makes you look and feel smarter, even if you actually don't use all this stuff. It's priceless.
Omg yes the blue led spotlights blaring in your face - that fad has to die! My new product startup process: Plug-in, turn-on, get tiny square of electrical tape to cover up damn blinding blue led.
I desolder blue LEDs outright. _Much_ more satisfying. And, since I'm in there, if they have any function I can replace them with a nice warm white LED.
The range switch on the Fluke is designed that way to prevent accidental shorts. Imagine accidentally frying a $1200 ECU because you were in the wrong mode. Can't even drive to the store to buy another after! :D
On the degrees button on your calculator, I hate to say that I use it all the time! I have an old Casio calc that I still use every day. One of the things I did with it was a program I wrote to compete in TSD (Time Speed Distance) road rallies. Each time through the loop it would display the current time I should be at the next tenth mile. So I used the shift degree button to convert to mins/secs. Besides AC and EXE that might be the most used button on my calculator!
Great video! Try being left handed. You notice things ALL THE TIME. Some subtle, some not so subtle, and some that a right handed person would have NEVER imagined. I'm so used to some things now that I think I probably would have a higher learning curve trying to use them with my left hand. Here's an example: the number pad on a keyboard. I realize there are separate number pads now that can be put on the left hand side, but the keypad is still for right handers. I'm loving your videos!
Philips PVR and consumer electronics with laggy interfaces : I press a button on the remote, I expect at least some confirmation that the machine has accepted the command before spending over a minute rummaging around some godawful data structure in its internal files to give a list of recordings. Seriously. The machine typically holds about 50 recordings. What's so hard about displaying a listing of 50 recordings?
My Fujitsu Siemens laptop has the fan intake at the bottom, so I cant have the damn thing on my lap! I even have to put something under it so it can vent properly on my table. My w302 cellphone cant be reached when charging in my usb.
Has anyone ever worked with one of those RaidoShack ColdHeat soldiering irons? They are impossible! The tip only begins to heat up when it is applied to the joint. It uses electricity to heat the wire, not the tip! It is designed to ruin sensitive electronics and not for SMDs. It is a thirty dollar piece of junk that is not worth purchasing for anyone because they would just be frustrated with it. It wouldn't even make a decent hobbyist tool because it does not heat up enough to melt soldier!
I have to echo the blue light thing here I suffer from extreme migraines and one thing that is sure to cause one is bright lights anyway about 2 weeks ago I bought myself a Bugera 6262 amplifier which has 2 of these "jewel lights" on it anyway as it is a head amplifier it sits on 2 cabs which put it at face height - well I'm sure you can see where this is going I turned it on and was blinded for about 10 mins with dam light spots in my eyes by these crazy bright blue lights! good amp though!
Hah, I had one of those shuttles. The computer was in a different room, and the light /still/ kept me awake. That thing must be pushing 25 lumen. (sliiiight exaggeration.) Painful to look at with dark adjusted eyes. I was going to replace the LED, but the electrical tape was closer. (also works on blinking VCR clocks, if you have any of those...)
Epic freaking video. My girlfriend is a graphic designer and constantly finds flaws in so many things such as logo's and business cards, etc and this video reminds me of how she always spots things that are not right or out of place or whatever. Anyway I am going to subscribe to your channel now!
On the topic of the Princeton Tec lights. I work as a millright, essentially a mix of industrial mechanical maintenance and industrial machine installation. I was working a longer term job at a local John Deere foundry and bought a headlight for my hardhat. It was a Princeton Tec product. I believe it was designed for people doing general outdoors activities and not the industrial worker. I really loved this light. Nice and bright, great battery life, and multiple light intensity modes that worked great depending on what I was working on and ambient lighting. This light did not have the issue that you showed with the bike light. It had 4 modes plus off if I remember correct with a single button for mode selection that just cycled through. If you left it on any setting for more than 10 seconds, the next click of the button turned it off.
Comcast DVR's shouldn't even exist.Of all the guide data in the world you would think the cable provider would have good guide data. Their TV guide data is always wrong. Fast forward is dogy at best. I can't simply FF count 3 seconds then hit play, It's "recoil" (as i call it) is never a consistent time so i spend a good 10 seconds slow fast forwarding to get to the end of the commercials. Scheduler will always pick the wrong programs so you have to baby sit it every day to make sure it records.
When I got this LG 17" LCD monitor some two months ago the blue LED power-on indicator just drove me nuts! Didn't the LG guys test this product? It's just so bright you can't look at the screen without being blinded by the LED. I immediately put a tape over it and then used a marking pen to filter the brightness to a level I found comfortable. I have the same problem with my Sanwa DMM. No separate on/off switch. Their old model used to have it.
I have a dual bench power supply wich doesn't have a button to desactivate just one of the power supplies, instead you have to turn the whole thing off or unplug the probe everytime you want to change something.
That PVR remote is a very generic design, I've seen it with a lot of OEM gear. In fact, I'm holding one for something completely different as we speak. So that explains the fact it doesn't seem to fit the product at all!
This video reminded me of something. When I was a really young, I recall that my dad went back to college to re-train, he was studying some sort of electronics course, and also working in product testing and certification of home electrical devices at the same time. Anyway, I'll never forget his stories of a Bart Simpson telephone they had in at work, that just...failed certification miserably on just about everything, though I believe he said small and easily breakable parts that could constitute a choking hazard was the main issue. I just recall him coming home ranting all - "What an absolute, utter piece of..." :D I think it sounds really quite fun as a job though, scrutinizing designs of and then torturing products. Some of the 'methods' he told me of them using really did amuse me. All the impact & drop tests, cable strain-relief tests; just loads of horror 'scenarios' that could occur in a home to a product that might damage or render it unsafe.
I've had the overly-bright power LED thing with my Lian Li computer case, too. I covered it up with a blob of blue-tack and use the light which leaks out through the lens for the HDD light instead. Another LED annoyance: I have a Western Digital USB3 hard drive which has a white LED which blinks while it's plugged into a computer, but the computer is off. This is a problem if you're trying to sleep in the same room as the computer, so you have to unplug it from the computer when you go to bed. It wouldn't be such a problem if the light either didn't blink or the output was limited to the tiny little spot on the front of the drive's case, but no, it leaks out everywhere else through the air vents on the case, bathing a large swathe of the room in blinking white lines. Seriously, don't make standby lights blink, and don't make them so bloody bright! Software annoyance: I own precisely one BluRay disc, and when I have to browse the menus on it when playing it in PowerDVD, I have to bring up an on-screen keypad instead of just being able to click on the menu items to select them. Is this a BluRay feature, or just shoddy programming on the menu writer of the Inception BluRay discs?
My new pc has also the (overused) superbright blue LED. At night I don't need any light, everything is well visible :) At least I have it on the floor and don't have to look directly into it.
Keyboards with no insert key. Keyboards with a tiny backspace key and retardedly huge return key. Keyboards with that silly setup where they cram home, end, page etc in to s 2x3 row and place left arrow under shift. Keyboards that don't let you press certain, random combinations of buttons. Keyboards with mushy, unresponsive keys. Bleh, I have yet to find a perfect keyboard. This apple keyboard comes close, but it's not perfect, like unremoveable keycaps so it's hard to clean.
Some car radios like mine and my dads doesn't store their settings when the power is disconnected. Even though they're connected to power most of the time, there are times when you're doing certain service work and want to disconnect the battery. And when you do that all the settings are lost, and you'll need to spend half an hour programming all the radio stations and adjusting the brightness, the EQ and stuff. Did they forget that this thing is going in a car, or did they just assume people never service their cars? And hey! All car radios has USB nowadays. Couldn't they at least give you an option to export your settings on to your USB drive? It shouldn't cost more than a few extra lines of code.
2:00 Actually, having a hyperbolic modifier is quite sensible since it allows for 6 operations (cosh, sinh, tanh, arccosh, arcsinh, and arctanh). And as for the point of even having them, only because you don't find things useful doesn't mean those things are useless. Some standard calculators have a special button for applying percentages, as in "200%25=" would give you 50. But that is total crap as you can use "200*0.25=" instead. But for someone who isn't mathematically minded the button is great. In the same vain the hyperbolics are useless to basic users while very useful for, say, an engineering student. (I know this video is ancient, but I wanted to get this out anyway.)
He's not saying the _operation_ is useless, he's saying it's dumb to have a _dedicated_ key for it, when it could simply be a secondary (shift) function on an existing key, or a shift function on that key while putting a more common operation as the main (non-shifted) function.
He did exclaim _"Whoever uses hyperbolic trigonometry?"_ Which sounds to me like he thinks they are practically useless. You could add another function to he hyp key, but I think there is a deliberate design choice to put four trig buttons on their own. They already allow for 12 operations as is. More than the other buttons.
RFC3514 Even so, it's a single key that gives you 6 functions. It's convenient in a usability sense and efficient compared to the other buttons (6 functions compared to 1 or 2).
Alcesmire I don't think the issue with interface design is _how many_ sub-options you get out of each control. What should determine the prominence of a control is _how frequently_ or _how likely_ it is to be used. And if something is less likely to be used (regardless of how many sub-options it has), it can be placed at lower level (i.e., as a secondary function, or as a sub-menu option in a program, etc.), instead of taking up space on the topmost interface layer, that could be used for something more common. Think of it as running the UI hierarchy through an entropy encoder. If the number of sub-options were the determining factor, then the digit keys would be removed. ;-)
Not every device, every device where you will get a use out of the camera. Someone like you, who i doubt ever uses a camera in your daily life, is not the target market.
I took a semester of product design at an art school and the biggest lesson I learned was. It doesn't matter how good the product is, all that matters is looks. You have to find a team of designers and engineers to get something decent. Not all designs are bad. I dropped it after that semester and I've been trying to make decent stuff myself.
I feel your pain on the lights for sure! I have a wonderfully bright flashlight but my main gripe about it is the same as your bicycle light. You have to cycle through 4 more modes to turn the darn thing off, so frustrating.
@EEVblog Hmmm, I just double-checked with my Casio fx-991ES if I missed that feature, but i seems that this particular calculator doesn't have it. Even if no number was entered pressing the PI-key yields Exp which is quite senseless...
Absolutely -- If you need to perform a hyperbolic sine, how else would you do it? But the point, I suppose, is that it could be a 2nd function rather than a primary key.
Audio amplifiers always have heat problems: *hot components are always placed next to electrolytic capacitors *heat sinks add shipping/material weight and don't look sleek *fans are frowned upon because they create unwanted noise (which gets drowned out by the speakers) *components running near their thermal limits in "normal" operation is acceptable
Few people notice because we're so used to it, but why do we have do click a button called start (explicitly written in versions from 95 to XP) in MS Windows if we want to turn off our computers? Actually, if you want to restart it, in versions from 95 to 98 or Millenium (I don't know for sure), you have to click Start -> Shut Down -> Restart, even though you do not want to start it nor shut it down! MS products in general are the ones that drives me nuts most often!
+João Guilherme They called it start so people would remember the button that let's them do anything. It's now called the Windows button, matching the name on the keyboard.
My crappy LG TV (that only lived for two years) had a very bright red led when on (dimmed when off). Had to use black tape to cover it up. Now I have a Samsung where you can chose iwhen the light is on.
One thing that really bothers me is on my Dell Inspiron 15, if it's in sleep with the power light fading in and out, the computer only turns back on when the light is off or faded. What the hell?
hey Dave! :) a thing you can try out with your bike light. Instead of step trough all the modes, try to just hold down the button for a couple of seconds. it works on my cheapy crappy bikelight. Just hold the button down until it shuts off. Give it a try! :) cheers!
wooo another episode! I just got a TI-84+ today, no problems with the design so far, except I'm having problems transferring anything to or from it. Can't wait for the show on the Feminine hygiene projects lol
on the bike light, try holding the button down. might not work, but that is sometimes the "off" signal. with a single button you need some way to allow different modes. but with a single button that precludes the idea of a single button off.
I would bet you that these design decisions were simply cut corners on cost. During the prototyping phase, the engineers cooked something up strictly for testing and it served their purposes. Then a decision is made later in the design phase to just go to market with it.
My cameras' quality bugs me, I don't know why they insist on using these CMOS image sensors where you need to be on the surface of the sun to have just enough light to film something, the pictures often grainy, plus anything moving appears to skew. What's wrong with using the good ol' CCD type? The sound although not terrible, is not great either, I actually set up a separate microphone and tape recorder recording simultaneously when I do my videos.
I once had a multimeter that had a separate on/off switch. Once it was off and set to L mode and I tried to measure the voltage on a 300VDC power supply. Result - meter no longer measured L or C. A cheaper meter has combined power/mode selector and when off ,the inputs are either disconnected or it is set to 1kVDC mode, so, no big problems if I forget to turn it on. With the more expensive meter I always turn the mode selector to 1kVDC when I turn the meter off.
Pentium100MHz No meter is supposed to be damaged by a wrong setting of the mode switch. Just saying. If it does, then it’s junk and it dying saved you from it blowing in your face when a transient comes along. Good riddance.
I had to go check my own Panasonic camcorder and sure enough it does the exact same thing. Even more fun, it swaps the image left to right if I press the physical menu buttons on the display. I am no fan of princeton tec lights. Their dive light I bought was hopelessly short lived. Another brand, UK, produced a light that put the reflector in contact with another metal, resulting in guaranteed delamination of the reflector. Three returns later, they stopped using the reflective coating.
Yes, totally agree! Every calculator I like needs and have a dedicated 1/x button - HP48SX - the only one. And of course no dedicated hyp button. Thanks! ;-)
I got this kit and it was a lm317 variable power supply you were supposed to put a heatsink on it but the main capacitor was bigger than the lm317 so you had to bend the 317 over to put a heatsink on it if it wasn't a weird ass clip on heatsink
Almost all electronics are made in China. Along with just about everything else. Here's the rule with the Chinese: If you hire them to paint the USS Ronald Reagan they will know the exact cost of the very last brush stroke of paint. They are not going to put legends on the remote unless you pay them extra to do it. By the time you get your 50,000 remotes it's too late.
Hah, bad product design? I've seen beginners making µcontroller-based etching machines, where the most important feature is usually show the nickname of the maker on the LCD screen for 5 seconds after booting up. :D Totally useless and annoying, but boosts up ego of the designer, right? Or using 5 or 6-button keyboards to control the damn thing, which beeps with every button press, instead of using a _single_ rotary-and-switch encoder which dramatically speeds up setting everything up. Engineers can screw up UX design as equally as other people.
@zaafarj I've found that a small square piece of electrical tape with a needle hole in it to work pretty well. Changing out the resistor sounds like a good idea, as mentioned above.
When it comes to product design the road to failure is paved with expediency. The title "product engineer" isn't given to anyone who's competent - they won't last on the job....
i have a philips mc235b cd player its a great cd plyer but it drives me crazy that tere aer buttons on the renote that are not on the radio it dirves me crazy
My biggest peeve ever is newer microwaves that beep every few minutes if you don't grab what you heated up. I usually put something on the microwave and expect to grab it 15 - 20 mins later regardless of when it's finished, and the microwave beeping at me is the most obnoxious, concentration wrecking possible thing that can happen. I'm tempted to remove the piezoelectric piece...
It's usually just design by committee. There's never enough resources to create a perfect product, because eventually everything needs to get shipped. On the camera, I can imagine that touch screen for the pause an play button was last minute enough to not give the software guys enough time to program, test, troubleshoot, and repeat that process for getting the info, and the play button working perfectly. Therefore management decided that the info wasn't as important as the play button, and just ship a minimal viable product. As for the hyp function, maybe the guy who designed it way back in the day really thought it would come in handy, but then when it comes to redesigning the calculator the amount of people who care enough about calculator layout that it's a make or brake buying decision is so few that the cost of redesigning the button layout doesn't make sense. And no, this doesn't make these products poorly made. There's so much more that goes into product design than just your run-of-the-mill "does it work" questions. Clients and bosses who can't be bothered to stretch the budget, profit margins, schedules, and employee fulfillment all play far more into real product design and what makes a good product. Granted, good on everyone here who actually takes the time to learn what good and solid design is, that is the sign of a great engineer. But a great engineer is not just able to design well, but is cognizant of what is expected of them, and furthermore cognizant of how they're work impacts the company as a whole. Source - Electrical product engineer taking residence in Seattle Washington, USA
a soft on and off on a multimeter would waste battery power even if you left it in your toolbox for 6 months. although i do think it should have a hard on and off switch. and they do it by using the hard multi switch. but it would be cool for them to move it over to a hard switch apart from the radial dial.
I have a Shuttle myself, and I know exactly what you're talking about. I have it in my bedroom and I have to cover it with a T-shirt at night. I am seriously considering replacing the LED with a dimmer one; then again, I've been saying that for a year now.
Why click on next when you can click on the see all link at the top and have all the comments on 1 page? Control+ f brings up the word search function in most browsers to help find what U are looking for.
I hate any product which does not state its expected input voltage + max current rating near its supply receptacle. Especially when they do make the effort to include the DC symbol.
I agree with every point except for the Blue LED point.... If it was red most would complain its too dull. blue LEDs are pretty BECAUSE they are bright
I loathe the bright blue LED's that almost every tech manufacturer feels the need to include in every product they make. I recently got a new router, when shopping around any router covered in overly bright blue LED's was immediately disqualified. Sure, that information can be useful for diagnostics, but I do not need annoying flickering lights on all the time. Blue in itself is also problematic because it actually messes with our circadian rhythm, blue light inhibits the production of melanin, an hormone involved in sleep. a charger with a bright blue light in your bedroom actually actively makes your sleep worse. I blame sci-fi, everything is always covered in blue lights, so tech companies, wishing their products to look futuristic put them wherever they can. Most products could go without them or make due with low-powered ones in neat colours that don't mess with our sleep.
You need them for instance when you model SOI MOSFETs, or you use a pseudo-2d model for ultra-scaled MOSFETs, to account for the DIBL (drain induced barrier lowering) effect. Or the SRH recombination theory...
I bought one on a whim back a few years back. Literally complete garbage (and expensive garbage, too). The damn chisel tip chipped on me right one my first attempt because apparently I pressed too hard against a component, probably from the frustration of waiting a minute to see any effect on the solder.
about the HYP button maybe some industry really needs it, or used to ? the bike light, that's obvious it's cheaper, they save one switch and they're not going to lose sales because of it (in fact gain, because they can sell it cheaper) when you said you use your chrono every day I was wondering why ?! I don't even have a watch , but then I thought hey that's brilliant, there's tons of stuff I could measure how long they take, it's even more useful than a clock !!! I'm gonna go get one !
my LCD tv has a STUPID bright LED that says the tv is off :s it has a default blue screen for no input so why does it have to say its off, its in my bedroom and its bright enough to use as a nightlight
Perhaps you have missed an important aspect of product design. Products are designed on purpose to become annoying, to wear out, to break...so that upgrades can be made...so that you have to purchase again...and people stay employed. Just look at how Apple does it. They built the Macbook with a firewire port, then they took it out of the design, and then they put it back in, and then they took it out again!!!
I have a fairly cheap wireless mouse that has the single battery located on far right side. It really makes the mouse off balance! Sometimes though I guess you just get what you pay for.
Funny that you now have two multimeters of your own design with rotary on/off
Speaking of Rotary switches in multimeters. . . I found a Multimeter that could do everything. I mean measuring lux, audio, temperature, capacitance (basic, not real LRC) and I loved it! got for a great price too second hand.
One day we were having trouble with our power experiencing Brown Outs, so we setup the mulitmeter to check out the line and left it there (the AC socket) for a while to monitor it.
The next day the thing had obviously turned itself off and I needed to use it. So in order for me to turn it on again, I had to rotate the rotary switch through ALL the other functions. Silly me, I forgot its sitting on Live AC. and well... a PCB track was blown straight off and its now ruined...
haha too bright leds on devices is a real problem. the led on my usb charger is so bright, it lights up the whole room :D
Kek5kopF Like novice students look up how much current the LED needs in a datasheet. They see something like 20 mA max. Then they select a resistor or current source that meets that 20 mA level!
At the University, I sometimes use the Agilent DSO3062A with USB Host. It can save waveforms on a USB drive, but you can't open them with the provided software, so you have to open the waveform again with the scope, connect the scope via the USB slave to the PC, and download the waveform. That just doesn't make sense! The information is on the USB drive in a single file!
I know nothing about engineering, I am a Marketing Major and work in Marketing & Sales at Techmaster (calibration laboratory that also sales fluke, besides other brands..) I must say I love your videos, they make me understand "this world" a little bit better.... keep up the good work!!
Speaking of blue LEDs - this video inspired me to finally take apart the el cheapo 19inch TV in our bedroom and remove the high intensity blue 'standby' panel LED which used to light the while room when you finished watching TV at night.
Perhaps I've got it wrong though and it was actually a safetly feature to keep me awake incase its dodgy internal power supply burst into flames overnight!
My 2010 Chevy Equinox has a USB port for the sound system. I have a thumbdrive with my music collection on it plugged into the audio system. When you start the car it takes a couple minutes to create an index of the mp3 files. That's OK, but in the meantime the default mode is to start playing the first tune on the drive (alphabetically) so that every time you restart the car it plays the same tune! You can't change it until it has finished indexing. Then after it has indexed all the tunes you have to dig into the menu options and either select the tune you want or set it to random play. When you start the car it ought to go back to wherever you were in the index and in whatever search mode you were in when the car was shutoff or simply default to random play. To get around this maddening feature I put a mp3 recording in the front (alphabetically) with seascape sounds which is more or less white noise but far less annoying than hearing the same tune a thousand times a year.
I am a composer with a recording studio full of what is considered to be professional equipment. It seems almost everything electronic these days, both hardware and software, all come with glitches, flaws, bugs, poor layout/design, useless functions, incompatibilities, conflicts, etc... of some kind or another. Worst part is that it seems that people have come to accept that nothing works perfect and just live with that acceptance like it's the norm. They still buy it, find workarounds and wait for the next version to hit the market, which is usually not much better. It's ridiculous. Drives me crazy when I spend a couple grand on a new piece of gear that is popular seller, has 5 star reviews and find out afterward from the manufacturer that it has known issues. Product technology is not advancing, only changing, and quality and reliability has become a thing of the past.
Hey,
I live and study in Austria. The public train transport (ÖBB) has these really useful ticket machines. They work very well (including the touchscreen) they are quickn and they're even mounted on different heights in order to enable people of any stature to comfortably purchase their ticket. There is one thing though: up until last year there where no QWERTY (german QWERTZ) keyboards on them to enter the station you will be traveling to. So the letters where sorted alphabetically on the screen. Now who in the world would possibly think that an alphabetic keyboard would be easyer to use than the one you can find on any Computer, Laptop and even Typewriter?? Fortunately they heard the call and now you can change the Keyboard layout.
youtube on PS4 still has this problem
That qwertz thing is insufferable if u got used to qwerty
A lot of products have small buttons or cinch plugs or anything on the outside. That's all fine, but they're usually mounted fairly weak on the circuitboard. So after a couple hundred button presses, it just snaps off the circuit board (or bends) and the button disappears inside the appliance. The device still functions fine, it's the buttons that aren't properly supported on the inside. I've seen this so many times, makes me wonder if they do it on purpose.
I can't agree more on the blue LEDs. It seems there's an unwritten law forbidding to use other colors (or less intensity) for power on indicators.
One thing on Casio calculators: Why on earth did they decide to put Pi and Exp on the same freeking button?! These keys are vital to an electronics engineer. They should be both accessible without shifting. But then again, the HYP-Key is of course muuuch more important than these two...
@gishidenki To Casio's credit, the PI key works without shifting before number entry starts, so it's rather a clever combination I think.
Designed obsolesence, digital cables (??), auto power off, 4 inch woofers, directional patch cables (come-on), break in periods, tube superiority, phono circuitry removed (Bluetooth added), all the new audio gear, Audio-Grade capaciators, coils, and resistors, AC power conditioners, speaker wire elevated on dixie cups, . . . . cell phones. The Navy can't even fire their weapons if the computers go out !!!!!
HUGE peeve. I work in a data center every day. Why are there no universal standards on power cable 'clips' to hold them into their receptacles? This is the MOST important cable you have to plug in, and most often all it takes is a very light tug from an errant rack door or misstep to kill the power supply to any piece of equipment! Preposterous! Some brands have been better about shipping their own brackets for power cables on servers and racks more recently. Come on! It is 2010!
Garmin GPS - Charges with a mini-B USB charge - plugging there's in and everything operates fine, plug a generic on in and you can't use the GPS. It will still charge, but it won't let you access the GPS functionality. Found this out on a trip in which I grabbed the first mini-B cigarette lighter adapter out of my car along with the GPS unit going on a family trip. Of course I figure it out in the middle of nowhere - battery running down - after I decide to fish the adapter out of my bag.
Dell laptops: Two things. First, having to flip the lid up to access the external volume controls. This is ridiculous, if you are going to put a button on the case for volume, it should always be accessible. Related: bright laptop LEDs to light up my room when it is dark -- unnecessary!
This all relates to keeping the laptop on the nightstand and using it as sleeping music and/or alarm clock. So I just use black electrical tape on all LEDs now =)
I was shooting at an event last night with my "new" Pentax K-7 (which I generally am pretty happy with). I decide to use one of my old lenses (50mm, f1.9, due to low light) that is fully manual (no AF and only manual aperture).
But then the camera "forces" aperture-priority (Av) in all modes (exc. Manual). WHY?
It's ok for most modes (as P, TV etc), as the camera can't set the aperture automatically. But to force Av in TAv-mode (you set time and ap., it sets ISO) is not ok. [...]
The reason why you lose the info when the display flips is (probably) because the inverter is _before_ the graphics generator in the circuitry. That means that, to display the graphics when the screen is "upside down", they would have to create a whole new function to draw them with the new orientation, and (assuming that's a touch screen) also to read the touch coordinates upside down.
A better design (obviously) would have been to code / connect the screen flipper as the last step, and make it flip the finished image (video + graphics) and flip the touch coordinates before feeding them back to the input handler.
They're probably using some flip function in the video encoder chip itself, instead of adding a flip function to the display controller (and therefore saving a few cents). That's the only reason I can think of to design it in such a dumb way.
I seen the post by TheInternetwatcher and I have a story that rivals it. A few years ago, when I bought my laptop, I also purchased a cheap Logitech wireless mouse. I think I spent like $10US on it. It has been through the ringer, tortured, abused, dropped, even submerged in water, and it STILL WORKS! Recently I bought a newer higher end mouse and used it for a couple of days. I quickly found out that the laser would bounce off any surface and make my pointer wander aimlessly across the screen.
more of those annoying hi-power blue led's in hdd enclosures...
And one of the BIGGEST fails i encountered on computers: I got my sister for her birthday a 2 gig ram module for her netbook, but i wasnt able to install it because the manufacturer of the board decided to solder the ram chips DIRECTLY on to the board instead of just using a socketed module, like everyone else does!
Hey! You just don't get it! That kind of dedicated keys on a calc makes you look and feel smarter, even if you actually don't use all this stuff. It's priceless.
Omg yes the blue led spotlights blaring in your face - that fad has to die! My new product startup process: Plug-in, turn-on, get tiny square of electrical tape to cover up damn blinding blue led.
I desolder blue LEDs outright. _Much_ more satisfying. And, since I'm in there, if they have any function I can replace them with a nice warm white LED.
The range switch on the Fluke is designed that way to prevent accidental shorts. Imagine accidentally frying a $1200 ECU because you were in the wrong mode. Can't even drive to the store to buy another after! :D
On the degrees button on your calculator, I hate to say that I use it all the time! I have an old Casio calc that I still use every day. One of the things I did with it was a program I wrote to compete in TSD (Time Speed Distance) road rallies. Each time through the loop it would display the current time I should be at the next tenth mile. So I used the shift degree button to convert to mins/secs. Besides AC and EXE that might be the most used button on my calculator!
Great video! Try being left handed. You notice things ALL THE TIME. Some subtle, some not so subtle, and some that a right handed person would have NEVER imagined. I'm so used to some things now that I think I probably would have a higher learning curve trying to use them with my left hand. Here's an example: the number pad on a keyboard. I realize there are separate number pads now that can be put on the left hand side, but the keypad is still for right handers. I'm loving your videos!
Philips PVR and consumer electronics with laggy interfaces : I press a button on the remote, I expect at least some confirmation that the machine has accepted the command before spending over a minute rummaging around some godawful data structure in its internal files to give a list of recordings. Seriously. The machine typically holds about 50 recordings. What's so hard about displaying a listing of 50 recordings?
My Fujitsu Siemens laptop has the fan intake at the bottom, so I cant have the damn thing on my lap! I even have to put something under it so it can vent properly on my table. My w302 cellphone cant be reached when charging in my usb.
Has anyone ever worked with one of those RaidoShack ColdHeat soldiering irons? They are impossible! The tip only begins to heat up when it is applied to the joint. It uses electricity to heat the wire, not the tip! It is designed to ruin sensitive electronics and not for SMDs. It is a thirty dollar piece of junk that is not worth purchasing for anyone because they would just be frustrated with it. It wouldn't even make a decent hobbyist tool because it does not heat up enough to melt soldier!
I have to echo the blue light thing here I suffer from extreme migraines and one thing that is sure to cause one is bright lights anyway about 2 weeks ago I bought myself a Bugera 6262 amplifier which has 2 of these "jewel lights" on it anyway as it is a head amplifier it sits on 2 cabs which put it at face height - well I'm sure you can see where this is going I turned it on and was blinded for about 10 mins with dam light spots in my eyes by these crazy bright blue lights! good amp though!
Hah, I had one of those shuttles. The computer was in a different room, and the light /still/ kept me awake. That thing must be pushing 25 lumen. (sliiiight exaggeration.) Painful to look at with dark adjusted eyes.
I was going to replace the LED, but the electrical tape was closer. (also works on blinking VCR clocks, if you have any of those...)
Epic freaking video. My girlfriend is a graphic designer and constantly finds flaws in so many things such as logo's and business cards, etc and this video reminds me of how she always spots things that are not right or out of place or whatever.
Anyway I am going to subscribe to your channel now!
On the topic of the Princeton Tec lights. I work as a millright, essentially a mix of industrial mechanical maintenance and industrial machine installation. I was working a longer term job at a local John Deere foundry and bought a headlight for my hardhat. It was a Princeton Tec product. I believe it was designed for people doing general outdoors activities and not the industrial worker. I really loved this light. Nice and bright, great battery life, and multiple light intensity modes that worked great depending on what I was working on and ambient lighting. This light did not have the issue that you showed with the bike light. It had 4 modes plus off if I remember correct with a single button for mode selection that just cycled through. If you left it on any setting for more than 10 seconds, the next click of the button turned it off.
Comcast DVR's shouldn't even exist.Of all the guide data in the world you would think the cable provider would have good guide data. Their TV guide data is always wrong. Fast forward is dogy at best. I can't simply FF count 3 seconds then hit play, It's "recoil" (as i call it) is never a consistent time so i spend a good 10 seconds slow fast forwarding to get to the end of the commercials. Scheduler will always pick the wrong programs so you have to baby sit it every day to make sure it records.
That's my 2nd BTTF reference in the blog so far, I'm not obsessed, really...
When I got this LG 17" LCD monitor some two months ago the blue LED power-on indicator just drove me nuts! Didn't the LG guys test this product? It's just so bright you can't look at the screen without being blinded by the LED. I immediately put a tape over it and then used a marking pen to filter the brightness to a level I found comfortable.
I have the same problem with my Sanwa DMM. No separate on/off switch. Their old model used to have it.
I have a dual bench power supply wich doesn't have a button to desactivate just one of the power supplies, instead you have to turn the whole thing off or unplug the probe everytime you want to change something.
On my Shuttle box,you can adjust the brightness of the LED's in the BIOS. ;-)
My printer (HP 2515) has low ink indicators for black and rgb inks, but it doesn't show you which is which.
Now in 2018 I am asking Dave: Why 121GW multimeter does not have on/off button!? Ahhh!??? ;-)
That PVR remote is a very generic design, I've seen it with a lot of OEM gear. In fact, I'm holding one for something completely different as we speak. So that explains the fact it doesn't seem to fit the product at all!
Yeah, there are lots of different aspect to product design!
This video reminded me of something. When I was a really young, I recall that my dad went back to college to re-train, he was studying some sort of electronics course, and also working in product testing and certification of home electrical devices at the same time.
Anyway, I'll never forget his stories of a Bart Simpson telephone they had in at work, that just...failed certification miserably on just about everything, though I believe he said small and easily breakable parts that could constitute a choking hazard was the main issue. I just recall him coming home ranting all - "What an absolute, utter piece of..." :D
I think it sounds really quite fun as a job though, scrutinizing designs of and then torturing products. Some of the 'methods' he told me of them using really did amuse me. All the impact & drop tests, cable strain-relief tests; just loads of horror 'scenarios' that could occur in a home to a product that might damage or render it unsafe.
I've had the overly-bright power LED thing with my Lian Li computer case, too. I covered it up with a blob of blue-tack and use the light which leaks out through the lens for the HDD light instead.
Another LED annoyance: I have a Western Digital USB3 hard drive which has a white LED which blinks while it's plugged into a computer, but the computer is off. This is a problem if you're trying to sleep in the same room as the computer, so you have to unplug it from the computer when you go to bed. It wouldn't be such a problem if the light either didn't blink or the output was limited to the tiny little spot on the front of the drive's case, but no, it leaks out everywhere else through the air vents on the case, bathing a large swathe of the room in blinking white lines. Seriously, don't make standby lights blink, and don't make them so bloody bright!
Software annoyance: I own precisely one BluRay disc, and when I have to browse the menus on it when playing it in PowerDVD, I have to bring up an on-screen keypad instead of just being able to click on the menu items to select them. Is this a BluRay feature, or just shoddy programming on the menu writer of the Inception BluRay discs?
My new pc has also the (overused) superbright blue LED. At night I don't need any light, everything is well visible :) At least I have it on the floor and don't have to look directly into it.
Keyboards with no insert key. Keyboards with a tiny backspace key and retardedly huge return key. Keyboards with that silly setup where they cram home, end, page etc in to s 2x3 row and place left arrow under shift. Keyboards that don't let you press certain, random combinations of buttons. Keyboards with mushy, unresponsive keys. Bleh, I have yet to find a perfect keyboard. This apple keyboard comes close, but it's not perfect, like unremoveable keycaps so it's hard to clean.
Yeah that's what I did, but the point is that it should come with it. You can fix any problem with any design if you wanted too... well almost any.
Some car radios like mine and my dads doesn't store their settings when the power is disconnected. Even though they're connected to power most of the time, there are times when you're doing certain service work and want to disconnect the battery. And when you do that all the settings are lost, and you'll need to spend half an hour programming all the radio stations and adjusting the brightness, the EQ and stuff. Did they forget that this thing is going in a car, or did they just assume people never service their cars? And hey! All car radios has USB nowadays. Couldn't they at least give you an option to export your settings on to your USB drive? It shouldn't cost more than a few extra lines of code.
2:00 Actually, having a hyperbolic modifier is quite sensible since it allows for 6 operations (cosh, sinh, tanh, arccosh, arcsinh, and arctanh). And as for the point of even having them, only because you don't find things useful doesn't mean those things are useless.
Some standard calculators have a special button for applying percentages, as in "200%25=" would give you 50. But that is total crap as you can use "200*0.25=" instead. But for someone who isn't mathematically minded the button is great. In the same vain the hyperbolics are useless to basic users while very useful for, say, an engineering student.
(I know this video is ancient, but I wanted to get this out anyway.)
He's not saying the _operation_ is useless, he's saying it's dumb to have a _dedicated_ key for it, when it could simply be a secondary (shift) function on an existing key, or a shift function on that key while putting a more common operation as the main (non-shifted) function.
He did exclaim _"Whoever uses hyperbolic trigonometry?"_ Which sounds to me like he thinks they are practically useless.
You could add another function to he hyp key, but I think there is a deliberate design choice to put four trig buttons on their own. They already allow for 12 operations as is. More than the other buttons.
Alcesmire And I'm sure he finds a lot of other functions there practically useless as well, but they don't have a dedicated key.
RFC3514
Even so, it's a single key that gives you 6 functions. It's convenient in a usability sense and efficient compared to the other buttons (6 functions compared to 1 or 2).
Alcesmire I don't think the issue with interface design is _how many_ sub-options you get out of each control. What should determine the prominence of a control is _how frequently_ or _how likely_ it is to be used.
And if something is less likely to be used (regardless of how many sub-options it has), it can be placed at lower level (i.e., as a secondary function, or as a sub-menu option in a program, etc.), instead of taking up space on the topmost interface layer, that could be used for something more common. Think of it as running the UI hierarchy through an entropy encoder.
If the number of sub-options were the determining factor, then the digit keys would be removed. ;-)
My biggest gripe is how every device now has to have a camera on it. Do we really need cameras on every type of device?
Not every device, every device where you will get a use out of the camera. Someone like you, who i doubt ever uses a camera in your daily life, is not the target market.
Dont complain about aditions some people use, thats not a product flaw, thats a feature.
Is there a blog entry where Dave talks about planned obsolescence? Haven't found one yet...
Hi my digital alarm clock has such a quiet buzzer it wont wake me up!
why do plastic items only last a couple of years???????
I took a semester of product design at an art school and the biggest lesson I learned was.
It doesn't matter how good the product is, all that matters is looks. You have to find a team of designers and engineers to get something decent.
Not all designs are bad. I dropped it after that semester and I've been trying to make decent stuff myself.
I feel your pain on the lights for sure! I have a wonderfully bright flashlight but my main gripe about it is the same as your bicycle light. You have to cycle through 4 more modes to turn the darn thing off, so frustrating.
@EEVblog Hmmm, I just double-checked with my Casio fx-991ES if I missed that feature, but i seems that this particular calculator doesn't have it. Even if no number was entered pressing the PI-key yields Exp which is quite senseless...
Absolutely -- If you need to perform a hyperbolic sine, how else would you do it? But the point, I suppose, is that it could be a 2nd function rather than a primary key.
My DigiTech RP250 Multi Effects pedal doesn't have an off switch. You have to turn it off by unplugging it.
Audio amplifiers always have heat problems:
*hot components are always placed next to electrolytic capacitors
*heat sinks add shipping/material weight and don't look sleek
*fans are frowned upon because they create unwanted noise (which gets drowned out by the speakers)
*components running near their thermal limits in "normal" operation is acceptable
Few people notice because we're so used to it, but why do we have do click a button called start (explicitly written in versions from 95 to XP) in MS Windows if we want to turn off our computers? Actually, if you want to restart it, in versions from 95 to 98 or Millenium (I don't know for sure), you have to click Start -> Shut Down -> Restart, even though you do not want to start it nor shut it down! MS products in general are the ones that drives me nuts most often!
+João Guilherme They called it start so people would remember the button that let's them do anything. It's now called the Windows button, matching the name on the keyboard.
the canon dv camera flaw seems more like a bug then design, my JVC camera retains all the screen info when flipped
My crappy LG TV (that only lived for two years) had a very bright red led when on (dimmed when off). Had to use black tape to cover it up. Now I have a Samsung where you can chose iwhen the light is on.
I have a couple of LGs and you can turn the light off in both of them. I guess it depends on the model.
One thing that really bothers me is on my Dell Inspiron 15, if it's in sleep with the power light fading in and out, the computer only turns back on when the light is off or faded. What the hell?
I've gotten so used to the mouse on the right that now its feels odd to mouse with my dominate (left) hand.
hey Dave! :) a thing you can try out with your bike light. Instead of step trough all the modes, try to just hold down the button for a couple of seconds. it works on my cheapy crappy bikelight. Just hold the button down until it shuts off. Give it a try! :)
cheers!
wasn't there something about the dangers of looking directly into the light from high brightness leds ?
wooo another episode!
I just got a TI-84+ today, no problems with the design so far, except I'm having problems transferring anything to or from it.
Can't wait for the show on the Feminine hygiene projects lol
on the bike light, try holding the button down. might not work, but that is sometimes the "off" signal. with a single button you need some way to allow different modes. but with a single button that precludes the idea of a single button off.
Some software programs I use have the exit or delete key/button RIGHT Next to the save button…. REALLY?
I would bet you that these design decisions were simply cut corners on cost. During the prototyping phase, the engineers cooked something up strictly for testing and it served their purposes. Then a decision is made later in the design phase to just go to market with it.
My cameras' quality bugs me, I don't know why they insist on using these CMOS image sensors where you need to be on the surface of the sun to have just enough light to film something, the pictures often grainy, plus anything moving appears to skew. What's wrong with using the good ol' CCD type? The sound although not terrible, is not great either, I actually set up a separate microphone and tape recorder recording simultaneously when I do my videos.
I really hate computer designs. You buy computer and turn it on. then WINDOWS loads. Crap
I once had a multimeter that had a separate on/off switch. Once it was off and set to L mode and I tried to measure the voltage on a 300VDC power supply. Result - meter no longer measured L or C. A cheaper meter has combined power/mode selector and when off ,the inputs are either disconnected or it is set to 1kVDC mode, so, no big problems if I forget to turn it on. With the more expensive meter I always turn the mode selector to 1kVDC when I turn the meter off.
Pentium100MHz No meter is supposed to be damaged by a wrong setting of the mode switch. Just saying. If it does, then it’s junk and it dying saved you from it blowing in your face when a transient comes along. Good riddance.
I had to go check my own Panasonic camcorder and sure enough it does the exact same thing. Even more fun, it swaps the image left to right if I press the physical menu buttons on the display. I am no fan of princeton tec lights. Their dive light I bought was hopelessly short lived. Another brand, UK, produced a light that put the reflector in contact with another metal, resulting in guaranteed delamination of the reflector. Three returns later, they stopped using the reflective coating.
Yes, totally agree! Every calculator I like needs and have a dedicated 1/x button - HP48SX - the only one. And of course no dedicated hyp button. Thanks! ;-)
I got this kit and it was a lm317 variable power supply you were supposed to put a heatsink on it but the main capacitor was bigger than the lm317 so you had to bend the 317 over to put a heatsink on it if it wasn't a weird ass clip on heatsink
Almost all electronics are made in China. Along with just about everything else. Here's the rule with the Chinese: If you hire them to paint the USS Ronald Reagan they will know the exact cost of the very last brush stroke of paint. They are not going to put legends on the remote unless you pay them extra to do it. By the time you get your 50,000 remotes it's too late.
Isn't it up to you to put in in the specifications? If then they won't follow them, they delivered a faulty product.
Hah, bad product design? I've seen beginners making µcontroller-based etching machines, where the most important feature is usually show the nickname of the maker on the LCD screen for 5 seconds after booting up. :D Totally useless and annoying, but boosts up ego of the designer, right? Or using 5 or 6-button keyboards to control the damn thing, which beeps with every button press, instead of using a _single_ rotary-and-switch encoder which dramatically speeds up setting everything up. Engineers can screw up UX design as equally as other people.
Yay I fixed it, all I had to do was re-install the driver and fiddle with the cable a bit.
@zaafarj
I've found that a small square piece of electrical tape with a needle hole in it to work pretty well. Changing out the resistor sounds like a good idea, as mentioned above.
When it comes to product design the road to failure is paved with expediency. The title "product engineer" isn't given to anyone who's competent - they won't last on the job....
i have a philips mc235b cd player its a great cd plyer but it drives me crazy that tere aer buttons on the renote that are not on the radio it dirves me crazy
if the dmm used a soft key for on/off it would be prone to accidental turn on
My biggest peeve ever is newer microwaves that beep every few minutes if you don't grab what you heated up. I usually put something on the microwave and expect to grab it 15 - 20 mins later regardless of when it's finished, and the microwave beeping at me is the most obnoxious, concentration wrecking possible thing that can happen. I'm tempted to remove the piezoelectric piece...
+seancsnm I once had a PC where the buzzer was put on the motherboard. I took a pair of pliers and just broke the stupid thing right off :D
It's usually just design by committee. There's never enough resources to create a perfect product, because eventually everything needs to get shipped. On the camera, I can imagine that touch screen for the pause an play button was last minute enough to not give the software guys enough time to program, test, troubleshoot, and repeat that process for getting the info, and the play button working perfectly. Therefore management decided that the info wasn't as important as the play button, and just ship a minimal viable product.
As for the hyp function, maybe the guy who designed it way back in the day really thought it would come in handy, but then when it comes to redesigning the calculator the amount of people who care enough about calculator layout that it's a make or brake buying decision is so few that the cost of redesigning the button layout doesn't make sense.
And no, this doesn't make these products poorly made. There's so much more that goes into product design than just your run-of-the-mill "does it work" questions. Clients and bosses who can't be bothered to stretch the budget, profit margins, schedules, and employee fulfillment all play far more into real product design and what makes a good product. Granted, good on everyone here who actually takes the time to learn what good and solid design is, that is the sign of a great engineer. But a great engineer is not just able to design well, but is cognizant of what is expected of them, and furthermore cognizant of how they're work impacts the company as a whole.
Source - Electrical product engineer taking residence in Seattle Washington, USA
Most bike lights I've seen are like that. I always thought it was annoying too but i guess they're cutting costs.
the older models didn't have that issue because they were essentially analog. it is cheaper to do it digitally.
a soft on and off on a multimeter would waste battery power even if you left it in your toolbox for 6 months. although i do think it should have a hard on and off switch. and they do it by using the hard multi switch. but it would be cool for them to move it over to a hard switch apart from the radial dial.
I have a Shuttle myself, and I know exactly what you're talking about. I have it in my bedroom and I have to cover it with a T-shirt at night. I am seriously considering replacing the LED with a dimmer one; then again, I've been saying that for a year now.
Why click on next when you can click on the see all link at the top and have all the comments on 1 page? Control+ f brings up the word search function in most browsers to help find what U are looking for.
Dude, you seriously need to get a sense of humor!
The uselessness of the primary HYP key is universally lauded.
5 stars for mentioning Back to the Future
I know it's pretty randomly asking but does anybody know a good place to stream newly released movies online?
@Albert Rodney i watch on FlixZone. Just google for it :)
@Jonas Colton Yup, I have been watching on Flixzone for since march myself =)
@Jonas Colton Thank you, I signed up and it seems to work :) I really appreciate it !
@Albert Rodney Glad I could help =)
I hate any product which does not state its expected input voltage + max current rating near its supply receptacle. Especially when they do make the effort to include the DC symbol.
I agree with every point except for the Blue LED point.... If it was red most would complain its too dull. blue LEDs are pretty BECAUSE they are bright
had the same penetrating blue LED on my LG FLatron. Had to cover it with black tape. bad design, i think!!
I loathe the bright blue LED's that almost every tech manufacturer feels the need to include in every product they make.
I recently got a new router, when shopping around any router covered in overly bright blue LED's was immediately disqualified. Sure, that information can be useful for diagnostics, but I do not need annoying flickering lights on all the time.
Blue in itself is also problematic because it actually messes with our circadian rhythm, blue light inhibits the production of melanin, an hormone involved in sleep. a charger with a bright blue light in your bedroom actually actively makes your sleep worse.
I blame sci-fi, everything is always covered in blue lights, so tech companies, wishing their products to look futuristic put them wherever they can. Most products could go without them or make due with low-powered ones in neat colours that don't mess with our sleep.
Why did we study hyperbolic functions in college? Are they useless? Who uses them? Just curious.
You need them for instance when you model SOI MOSFETs, or you use a pseudo-2d model for ultra-scaled MOSFETs, to account for the DIBL (drain induced barrier lowering) effect. Or the SRH recombination theory...
funcatvids Thanks for the response.
I bought one on a whim back a few years back. Literally complete garbage (and expensive garbage, too). The damn chisel tip chipped on me right one my first attempt because apparently I pressed too hard against a component, probably from the frustration of waiting a minute to see any effect on the solder.
about the HYP button maybe some industry really needs it, or used to ?
the bike light, that's obvious it's cheaper, they save one switch and they're not going to lose sales because of it (in fact gain, because they can sell it cheaper)
when you said you use your chrono every day I was wondering why ?!
I don't even have a watch , but then I thought hey that's brilliant, there's tons of stuff I could measure how long they take, it's even more useful than a clock !!!
I'm gonna go get one !
my LCD tv has a STUPID bright LED that says the tv is off :s it has a default blue screen for no input so why does it have to say its off, its in my bedroom and its bright enough to use as a nightlight
Perhaps you have missed an important aspect of product design. Products are designed on purpose to become annoying, to wear out, to break...so that upgrades can be made...so that you have to purchase again...and people stay employed. Just look at how Apple does it. They built the Macbook with a firewire port, then they took it out of the design, and then they put it back in, and then they took it out again!!!
I have a fairly cheap wireless mouse that has the single battery located on far right side. It really makes the mouse off balance! Sometimes though I guess you just get what you pay for.