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Comment by s17n | Hacker News Reader

Pushback is extremely unintuitive, it should do pushforward instead.

It has a pushforward mode - we just refer to it as nosediving. It's very intuitive, and a great trainer. Instills respect very quickly.

I don't think that would work, because pitching the board forward would require the wheel to accelerate to keep you upright. Also, what if it needs to warn you while you're actively accelerating (with the board already pitched forward)?

It also seems like they could do haptics, i.e. superimpose an audio-frequency wave on the motor current. Similar to the steering feedback you get with a lane departure warning system.

But then again it might be difficult/impossible to make it distinguishable from e.g. rough pavement.

An 80db piezo buzzer is $.13 and can operate on logic levels.

No need to get fancy

Deaf people exist.

It can also be hard to hear through e.g. a full-face helmet, or if you're (perhaps unwisely) wearing headphones.

This could 100% be done in software -- it's already adjusting the wheel speed a thousand times a second, it would be trivial to add some haptic oscillation.

Why? That would cause you to accelerate which would cause a nosedive.

Your natural reaction is to try to keep the board level, so when pushback happens, you push forward against it, which is telling the board to accelerate. Pushforward would be the opposite.

For what its worth this happened to me (I rode a onewheel without reading the instructions). The outcome was that I had no idea what was going on when pushback happened, and it was terrifying and probably dangerous, but ultimately my reaction to this scary situation was to slow the board down so I guess it worked.

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