Touch screen interface

[DavidDLC]

I was playing with my cell phone the other day ( touchscreen one ) and pretending to be using it as a mouse, I realize the future mouses can be touch screen, with similar shape of a cell phone, imagine you can personalize your mouse by setting the buttons you want on the screen, you can put more stuff on the screen as a calculator, or something else !

I also realize the DMMs of the future will have touch screen, same concept you can personalize your screen to show what you want, even graphics.

I really like the ideas ! Future DMMs should have the size and shape of big touch screen cellphones.

Well, just my ideas !

If you have a comment please post !

[alm]

Large screens are power hungry. The battery life of a smartphone is at least an order of magnitude less than a DMM, yet the battery capacity is much larger and the screen is off most of the time. Touch controls don't work well when you're not looking at the device. Fair trade-off for a general purpose device like a smartphone, not so much for a single-purpose tool. Touch screens are annoying if you want to point something out to a colleague, on scopes with touch screens the first thing many people do is turn off the touch screen.

[Mechatrommer]

Large screens are power hungry.

i was about to say this. but thought, what about combination of just touchscreen panel (without the usual power hungry colorful lcd) with just fixed "classic" lcd like 7segments dmm numeric lcd?

[Hypernova]

A good compromise is probably eink+cap touch sense grids. This way you get the customization while maintaining battery capacity. Unless you want you smart mouse to become a 2nd screen for your PC the slow refresh rate should be more than sufficient.

[Zad]

Personally, I wouldn't want my meter accidentally switching from Volts to Ohms or current range. Touch screens have their place, either in systems that need to re-configure themselves to have a wide variety of controls, or which need to really cut the cost of physical components, but some items need clear controls with direct feedback, and physical pressure to operate. Sometimes, newer is not better.

[Zero999]

It's colour which is really power hungry, a monochrome display would use a third of the power of a colour display and turning off the backlight cuts the power by a factor of over a 1000.

[McMonster]

The other problem with touchscreens is that you don't feel the buttons. I wouldn't use a mouse if I had to look at it to find a button or a DMM where I could accidentaly switch ranges or function. Let this kind of interface stay where it is now, everything has it's use.

[_Sin]

It would be nice to see a touch interface on a scope - the new Agilent 2/3000x scopes may be powerful in capability, but the UI sucks.

[McMonster]

I've seen HP device with touch interface on an online auction, but this was a multipurpose devices where you could put interface card for logic analyzer, scope, etc.

[ivan747]

It would be too expensive and not rugged enough. It you have a resistive touchscreen, it tears with sharp objects, if you have a capacitive touchscreen, you can't use it with insulating gloves. Most other technologies are too expensive or not widespread enough, as far as I am aware of.

E Ink is too expensive and the refresh rate sucks. You get ghosting as well. Anyway, here's an example of an actual mass-produced device that uses E-Ink and it's not an ebook reader:






If multimeters get touchscreens then you want something like this:


Not this:


A meter is a basic tool that should not get an unnecessarily complex functions, else it will loose its handiness. If you try to include too much functionality, you have to be carful not to put it all in a single menu. For instance, my BlackBerry phone has 30+ items in its main menu for the address book. How many of those items do I need? Something like 3: add contact (already elsewhere in the app), edit contact, send contact card. The rest is available elsewhere and should not go into that menu. You close it with a button, you don't need a menu option for that; there's a settings app, I don't need more options; I don't want to start the IM client from the contacts app because it is already 2 button presses away (faster than finding it in the menu). Well, sorry for this rant, but it is important to make the UI work fast and make it uncluttered.

Also, in the oscilloscope comparison it's obvious which one is better from a performance, safety and reliability point of view, but when you are measuring stuff quickly with a multimeter you don't want to wait for a complex UI to load all the functions you use only twice in a particular job.

[baljemmett]

It would be nice to see a touch interface on a scope - the new Agilent 2/3000x scopes may be powerful in capability, but the UI sucks.

The Rohde & Schwarz RTO series has a touch interface -- there was a brief glimpse of it in one of Dave's Electronex videos (around 6.50 in).

[vk6zgo]

The longevity of touchscreens in applications where they are continuously used to change equipment parameters is not always the best.

At my last job,we used a touchscreen in conjunction with a PLC to set the limits of operation,& to start & stop the motion of a patient treatment bed.

The settings were changed up to 20 times a day,& the start & stop 60 times.
After several years operation the touchscreen would begin to have intermittent failures.
We went through several of these units.

In the more usual applications,the settings would be done once,& the function would repeat thousands of times
before the touchscreen had to be used to change the settings,so our usage was quite a severe test.

Of course,this was just the result with this particular type of touchscreen,others may be better.

VK6ZGO

[Mint.]

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