January 27, 2006

PSOne LCD : 2

Stupid me for just reading the original bit-tech article, which was a rip-off of Starfox's original article. If I had been smart enough to read the comments by Starfox himself I would have noticed that DCC is not, in fact, optional. DCC is needed to turn the display on, obviously not optional.

The original correct article can be found here [ucc.asn.au].

Posted by Guy at 09:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 01, 2006

PSOne LCD

I finally got my PSOne LCD in the mail yesterday and look forward to ripping it apart and modding a VGA adapter onto it. Luckily I've run into a couple [bit-tech.net] of [ucc.asn.au] articles [rudyatek.com] on exactly how this is done. The bit-tech forums [bit-tech.net] are also a treasure trove of information for all sorts of questions.

Posted by Guy at 11:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 29, 2005

No Touchscreens Please

First of all, let me say that I love touchscreens. If I could marry a touchscreen and have little touchscreen babies I would. That being said, I believe touchscreens have their places, but an automobile/car is not one. It's been my experience that most drivers need to concentrate on a multitude of other inputs and probably don't have the attention to spend on the displays that they need.

Yes, most touchscreens need a lot of attention. Just think of touchscreen ATMs, they have big screens with big buttons and I still have a problem getting the thing to recognize all my touch inputs. Touchscreens can become out of whack for a multitude of reasons, including varying temperatures. This is something that I know I've dealt with in the past, the interior of my car has gone from -5 deg F to 75 deg F in under and hour and sometimes in the wintery north I've seen it get to -20 deg F! I know some you are poo-pooing me, but I think that's damn cold.

So what I'm getting to is that most poorly designed (and some phenominally defined) user interfaces that depend on touchscreens can be more of a hindrance than a help in automotive applications. I think a much better system is to use soft buttons. This is the system that the Commanche helicopter was going to use before it was cut and it's just a more sophisticated Logitech Harmony Remote [logitech.com] LCD interface.

Posted by Guy at 02:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack