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Comment by curmudgeon22 | Hacker News Reader

During Covid, I've often wished I could reprogram the elevator of the apartment building I live in. The current rule is only 2 people can be in the elevator at a time.

Problems that arise:

* Elevator stopping frequently, but already at capacity, slowing down overall performance

* Elevator always goes to bottom (or top) first to pick up passengers going up (or down). This means if your waiting on the ground floor and it's a busy time, folks at the parking levels will repeatedly get picked up before you.

Possible solutions:

* First come, first served (need to remember order of what floor pushed button when)

* Ability to set elevator as "full". Even if abused by a single person, still better than multiple wasted stops.

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I mean you aren't wrong, but also this is all logic tha has existed in elevators for decades, but if your building owner just slaps a piece of paper artificially creating a limit the elevator system won't be aware of it. On other hand they could have made an configuration order and paid to change the behavior of the elevator, to reduce its capacity. Then it wouldn't make extra stops since it would know that it is at max capacity.

Elevator could also make a decent guess at fullness just by recording the discrete changes in weight. It wouldn't be perfect but again it would probably be better than allowing user input.

i believe all elevators at least have a failsafe to refuse to run if they are overloaded. going from there to tracking and using the actual weight for its programming is not a big step

Oh, elevators know to some accuracy how many people-mass things are in it. It just rarely has reason to use that information.

Another failure: when there's a line, and you already know you'll need multiple cars, the elevator button will still only allow you to call one car at a time. Even if several cars are already on your level with the doors closed.

> Ability to set elevator as "full". Even if abused by a single person, still better than multiple wasted stops.

I'd add a couple of sensors (one for volume and one for weight) to let the elevator itself determine how full it is and act accordingly.

I would also still have a "full" button for people to press, but not have the button actually do anything, except maybe light up.

During COVID I think it's totally reasonable for any person to be able to set the elevator as "full" - if you're returning from travel and quarantining, immunocompromised, etc. you might not want to travel with anyone.

Also,

* Elevator door closes when it's not in use - may as well stay open, get some ventilation, and use slightly less energy!

> any person to be able to set the elevator as "full"

Sadly, in an apartment building there are several people who are selfish. These types would use the feature to monopolize the elevator for moving.

> door closes - stay open?

Prob to reduce the time to travel to a floor. If the doors were open it would add another 15secs in addition to the travel time to reach the called floor.

Fun fact: all of the above things are features that exist on elevator controllers. Most buildings just never have their elevators configured correctly.

Would a first order approximation of "full" be "has two destinations"

You could but if passengers knew that it would result into single passengers pressing two car calls so they could get private elevator ride. Rather you would just use the normal passenger counting system i.e. correlating weight scale with photocell cuts.

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