Undo codes for Japanese elevator floor buttons | Hacker News Reader

Undo codes for Japanese elevator floor buttons

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145 pointskalimanzaro99 comments

Other things about Japanese elevators

99% the "close door" button works immediately. Vs say USA where 80% are not even connected and where some are connected but the door doesn't respond for 1-2 seconds?

95% there are no light sensors, only pressure sensors. I'm guessing in the USA those are mandatory that there is a light sensor that if interrupted, causes the doors to open. In Japan those mostly don't exist, there is only a pressure sensor

In Japan it's not uncommon to have someone exit the elevator and just as they exit, press the close button so the door will close immediately behind them. This is a "sorry I interrupted your time by having to stop the elevator" gesture. This wouldn't work in the USA because the light sensors would trigger the doors reopening.

> In Japan it's not uncommon to have someone exit the elevator and just as they exit, press the close button so the door will close immediately behind them. This is a "sorry I interrupted your time by having to stop the elevator" gesture. This wouldn't work in the USA because the light sensors would trigger the doors reopening.

Sounds annoying. If I see an elevator stop at a floor then I'd like a chance to actually get on it, instead of having my time wasted by a futile gesture that might save someone a second or two.

You don't think that before doing this gesture, the individual would check if there were people waiting to get on the elevator?

Hardly seems like it'd save any time if they would.

They're walking out, it will be clear if someone is there and take no additional time.

It doesn't take any time, you just see if there's people outside or not when the doors open.

I never saw anyone do this in Japan. Because you can slide out before the doors are fully open, in this case people in elevator can close the doors earlier. If you wait for them to fully open and close them yourself then its wasting time.

I haven't seen this either, but the only building I'm particularly familiar with used 2 story elevators (board at 1 or 2, arrive at 17 or 18), so I'm guessing the close door button isn't going to do much (the elevator on the lower level has to deal with the loading conditions of the upper level, and vice-versa).

In the USA close door button is generally gated behind the firefighter's emergency operation key being activated from what I understand?

I don't think this is the case. Maybe it's a placebo button in some cases? But I've definitely ridden in elevators where the "close door" button has nearly immediate effect (usually older ones). The button never overrides the safety bumpers that reopen the doors, they just bring about the natural closing sooner.

Elevators have a “manual mode”. This is mandatory by law to exist for firefighters/emergency workers, but can be used for other purposes (eg when moving into a high rise apartment, you reserve the elevator for a few hours to move furniture), in commercial buildings sometimes the cleaning staff will use it to hold the elevator and their equipment on their floor as they go floor by floor.

Manual mode does override the sensor that checks if something is in the way, but doesn’t override the pressure sensor that responds if the door hits something when closing. You usually have to hold the close button while it beeps to close the door.

The buttons exist for manual mode. If they work elsewhere, that’s lucky. When I lived in a high rise, it took ~20s for my elevator doors to close. If you were the last one in, you might hit the button and see the doors close immediately, but only because of you timed it right, not because the button did anything during day to day usage. I’ve timed it, and my Otis elevator didn’t close faster due to the button.

The “open door” button obviously works most places.

The elevator of my building does seem to respond to close but it’s not super instant. It’s common for the people left in the elevator to press the close button which theoretically should work.

My office close button works. But then you’re standing in a closed elevator going nowhere. Hitting the floor button also closes the door. This is for a stopped/open elevator.

Once it’s moving with several floors selected, the open and close buttons don’t seem to do anything.

One reason door close buttons don’t work is because many places have a minimum time the doors have to remain open under ADA guidelines.

Once that time has passed, the door close. So there is no window in which the button would be useful.

I worked in a building once where the close door button started a 3ish second timer then would close. As a side effect if the door was close to closing already it would sometimes actually lengthen the time the door was open. Drove me nuts when people would come in late and hit the button.

Bad programmers are all around us. It could have been fixed with a min() call

In Seoul's subway stations, elevators usually take forever to close, like long enough to make you think "Geez if I just walked I would be on the other floor by now!"

And that's exactly the reason, i.e., to shoo away those with a good pair of legs, because otherwise people who do need elevators might end up waiting forever.

But even elevators in skyscrapers usually take forever to close, and nobody expects you to walk up stairs to the 50th floor just because you have a good pair of legs.

Elevators in skyscrapers use lots of the energy. Guess the owner wants to save some energy?

That seems like a prodigious waste of everyone's time. In Japan, from what I've experienced, when there are not many people, you can get the door to close immediately after you get in, and it starts moving very soon after that. Imagine all the productive hours lost because of this.

Hours? Seriously

It might only be a few minutes a day, but when applied on millions of people using elevators every single day, it adds up.

It does not create productive hours. One person can achieve quite a lot with additional 2 hours. 120 different people with 1 additional minute wont achieve anything of value in that one minute.

> many places have a minimum time the doors have to remain open under ADA guidelines.

What's the logic behind requiring this to happen every time? Why not just have a handicap button like doors do, and letting the elevator stay efficient the rest of the time?

How would a handicap person hit that button?

The same way they do when they hit the handicap buttons that open doors to buildings.

Elevators should have lower buttons for the handicapped

"All handicapped people are in a wheel chair"

Complain to the government then.

"Car Control Height. Maximum height for control buttons and mechanisms is 54 inches (1370 mm). Minimum height is 35 inches (890 mm)."

https://www.ada-compliance.com/ada-compliance/ada-elevators....

"No because that's government regulations and they are all bad"

Yeah. there is a minimum dwell time, and the door close button will never close the door sooner than that on modern code compliant elevators in normal operating mode.

It is possible that there will be a default dwell time that is larger than the minimum, in which case the pressing the door close button would shorten the window to the minimum, but most elevators won't do that as the minimum is long enough already.

Similarly the door close button may have effect when the door open period was extended, such as by the door sensors, or pushing the door open button to prevent door closing, but the exact details will vary.

In other operating modes, especially firefighter mode, but also some maintenance modes, and some modes that expect a dedicated elevator operator (who can ensure the door remains open long enough for disabled people if present), the door close buttons do absolutely do have an impact, and can violate the normal dwell time rules.

In the USA 99% of people press the "close door" button immediately upon entering, without looking whether someone else is currently headed to the same elevator. It makes sense to disable a button that people can't use politely.

How do you know they don't just do it because they're used to the door not closing immediately?

Does it matter in a situation, where you don't want to close the door immediately?

They are, and it doesn't. I don't understand your point.

They press the close door button because they know they have the time to turn around, notice someone else entering and press the open door button.

I remember a long time ago encountering an elevator (in the US) where the physical buttons were the push on/push off type so you could cancel using another press, and they also popped back out once the desired floor was reached. Anyone else remember that type of control? It's probably from the 40s/50s. I haven't seen one since.

I also recall encountering that sort of elevator panel with push on/push off buttons here in Brazil, it was probably in the 80s or 90s (or at most earlier 2000s), but I don't know how old that panel was. I haven't actually used that panel myself, since there was always an elevator operator (ascensorista) on that elevator; and I believe that these elevators have since been upgraded to a modern panel. And yes, I do recall seeing more than once the ascensorista pulling on the buttons to cancel a wrongly set floor.

No. But even in the 1980's the dorm elevator where I went to college had a way to cancel a floor select. I don't remember what the trick was though, but it was not a simple toggle.

I've seen these in old Boston and Brookline buildings.

I did a bit more searching and, thanks to YouTube's elevator enthusiasts (yes, really), I was able to find video of this type of control in operation, although it doesn't show whether this one will pop out and cancel if you press again:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZUUr2nHpAE

There's also the "push to call, pull to cancel" mentioned in a sibling comment --- observe how the buttons are shaped such that they imply you can pull on them:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzC5Bpz-PkQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYtsNxzDR50

> There's also the "push to call, pull to cancel" mentioned in a sibling comment --- observe how the buttons are shaped such that they imply you can pull on them:

Many thanks for these videos, the shape of the buttons in the last video is exactly how I remember them (both the push/pull floor select buttons and the push-only door close/open buttons, and yes, I'm sure it was an Otis); the main difference is that there were many more floors.

In Russia (and I presume in other former USSR republics) there's a once-common Soviet-era type of elevator that has buttons that stay pushed down and pop out like that. With a loud click that scares the shit out of you if you don't expect it. Except IIRC you couldn't push multiple buttons at once, all of them would pop out on the next stop. And you definitely couldn't undo them.

I'm still surprised nobody does the obvious.

Have a voice announce each floor. Much better than a stupid chime as each floor is passed, as then blind people have to count.

The voice is cheap as dirt, too. As the IBM PC showed, you can get perfectly intelligible voice from connecting a speaker to a 5V IO pin and turning it on and off rapidly, based on a recorded waveform. Wouldn't cost any more than a chime.

My furnace has a blinkenlight for its status. Slow blink, it's working ok. Fast blink, something wrong. I go have a look, it's blinking. Is that a fast or slow blink? I hate the people that design these things.

Wait, you don’t have that in your country?

Voice-announced floors is pretty much universal in China. In Hong Kong, it’s also done in three languages. The current direction (up or down) of the elevator is also announced. There are exceptions, of course, like really old buildings that don’t have rich incorporated owners to retrofit the elevators.

Nope.

Otis offered that as an option from the 1960s. Here's the vocabulary.[1] It's still available, but seems to have fallen out of fashion with the decline of elevator music.

There was even a "You are pressing too many floor buttons" message.

[1] https://www.soundboard.com/sb/OtisElevatorVoiceAnnouncements

I’ve been in elevators like that and it’s annoying

So depending on the manufacturer, one of these:

* Double press the button (like double-click)

* Long press the button

* Press the button 5 times really fast.

The article says this is in Japan, but would these not work anywhere?

Also, the Honda CR-V ad on this page (on mobile at least) is a new kind of annoying that I hope doesn't catch on, where it "frames" the web page, occluding the text you're trying to read. It sort of reminds me of dot-com era ad tactics, where no amount of annoying your customers is off-limits.

> where no amount of annoying your customers is off-limits

You aren't the customer. :) Their customers only care about ROI on their ad spend. This tactic is designed to benefit them, not you. Whether it does benefit them is debatable.

> You aren't the customer

I guess they are trying hard to keep it that way.

I do buy vehicles from time-to-time though, so I think I am a potential customer.

You missed the point. Honda may have some targeting data they send to the ad provider but it’s those ad servicers who come up with this format and their customer is both the site and the company the ad is for. It’s not you as the customer the format is made for, and Honda didn’t make it themselves either.

No, I get it.

I just don’t let a company off the hook because there is an intermediary between them and me.

At some level, Honda pays money to have ads shown and either approve of, or don’t care about, how it is displayed. Either way is bad in my opinion and leaves me with a negative impression of their brand.

Here is a list of single and double click by brands I found. Seems to be in asia mostly. Is it cultural that allows this in Asia or personal safety to disallow it outside Asia

https://elevation.fandom.com/wiki/Elevator_car_call_cancella...

In the US, it almost certainly consensus standards for in cab controls incorporated into building and fire codes by reference because elevators are important in fire fighting operations.

Our building has a different scheme where you summon the elevator by telling it which floor you want to go, and there are no controls inside the elevator to set the destination. This supposedly enables better scheduling of elevators.

I've worked in a couple of modern buildings in Australia that also feature this. While it's great for people that work in the building, you'd often see visitors get in the left, turn to look at the buttons and stop with their arm in mid air. By this point the doors have closed and they're whisked off on their mystical journey.

We have these in newer buildings here too, but definitely confusing if you're only used to the classic elevator system.

Not supposedly, for some definition of “better scheduling.”. Elevator scheduling is hard. It isn’t even clear what to optimize for. It certainly isn’t only #persons/hour or #person-floors/hour, as that could leave people stranded forever at some floors (example: why would an elevator ever make the long journey for the 10th floor to pick up passengers if it always has passengers waiting to move between doors 2 and 3?). “First come, first served” is fair, but may be too inefficient.

Simple example: the single elevator in a building is empty and heading up to the 10th floor to pick up people heading down. If there’s a button press “I want to go up” on floor 3 while the elevator passes floor 2, should the elevator stop at floor 3 to pick up passengers? Probably not, as the passengers might want to go to the 20th floor, and it would be unfair to those on the 10th floor for the elevator to go up to the 20th floor before picking them up.

(corollary: if you see an elevator going in the direction you want to go pass the floor you’re waiting on, that’s not necessarily a bug in the scheduler)

If, on the other hand, there’s a button press “bring me to the 10th floor”, the elevator could stop at floor 3, pick up passengers, drop them off at the 10th floor, pick up those waiting there and go down. That means those waiting on floor 10 have to wait a bit longer for the extra stop on floor 3, but efficiency in #persons/hour or #person-floors/hour goes up.

I worked for a few years in a building with these, and after seeing so many apparently inefficient passenger movements, I wondered if useage balancing for maintenance is at least in part what they optimize for?

> why would an elevator ever make the long journey for the 10th floor to pick up passengers if it always has passengers waiting to move between doors 2 and 3?

It's not that hard. One creates a cost function for each floor. The cost for a floor is the time spent since the button for that floor was pushed. The elevator goes for the floor with the highest cost.

It's the same idea with traffic lights. Have a cost function which is the wait time for each car. Minimize it. Of course, traffic lights never do this, resulting in grossly inefficient light changes.

It's probably more important for the elevator to behave predictably. Assuming everyone waiting for the elevator knows where it is at

1. it should always stop if it's going in the direction you want to go.

2. All people inside the elevator must be dropped off before changing direction

Those two combined means people will sometimes have to be dropped off at a floor they don’t want to go to. Are there elevators that do that? I’ve never seen one.

I guess that may be because it would require the elevator to inform the passengers “we’re at floor ten now. Everybody for floors ten and up, get out”, _and_ the passengers would have to hear that _and_ they would have to listen. It also may mean some floors sometimes get too busy with waiting passengers.

The Marriott Marquis in New York has this, that’s also some of the fastest elevators I’ve ever been in.

> According to the chart, if you’re on an elevator made by Mitsubishi, Matsushita, Toshiba, or America’s Otis, you can cancel a floor by quickly tapping twice (“double-clicking”) on the corresponding button.

If I had to guess I'd say in the US it's nearly always Otis or Schindler elevators that I'm riding. Do the Otis elevators installed in Japan have this feature but the Otis ones in the US lack the feature? I've never tried double-clicking to undo.

I have had it work once in the US out of more than 10 attempts.

   It did also work on a cruise ship, which was good because kids had hit all the floor buttons and run.

Double tapping or holding a lighted button works to cancel all the time in Japan.

There are other button codes. Once, when I was in Japan and we waited at 8am for a lot of full elevators going past opening up the person I got in with (to another nearly full elevator) held down the G button for several seconds, all of the floors flashed and we went straight down without stopping. I asked as we got off, and apparently on other elevators this floor bypass can be done by holding down the close door button the entire trip.

G button?

The "G" button often represents the Ground floor (aka "first floor" here in US). Sometimes in the US 'G' indicates "Garage".

Yes, and my memory may be faulty. It could have been a 1.

Often in the US it's also the P button(s) for Parking.

In Korean elevators the standard is to press the button once to cancel. Like a normal press. I wonder if these button press conventions are localized.

I've stayed in a hotel in Mexico that had this feature.

FWIW, I didn't recognize the manufacturer, and it's been too long for me to recall it offhand, but I thought it was a really neat feature. Very useful if you accidentally hit the wrong button or if some five-year-old wanted to see all the lights.

I've never seen a European elevator do this and I've used a lot of them in many different countries here.

People also tend to push the button here without looking whether it's already lit so this would probably backfire.

I saw this in an elevator in India recently. The third-hand instructions we heard were that you double-click the button to cancel, so all of us computer nerds were trying to double-click it like you would a mouse, when apparently it's click-pause-click.

I've seen elevators that ignore short presses of buttons. You press the button, it lights up, you release, the light goes off and the elevator pretends it was never pressed. Any idea why this is being done?

I don't know why someone implemented it specifically, but I can think of 2 possible reasons: (1) To prevent accidental presses, and (2) prevent maliciously pressing every button quickly.

Or a third option: it's just shoddy implementation that happens to have an annoying effect.

Could also be a debounce mechanism to cancel out multiple presses too close together which is just a reality on switches even if you physically only pressed it once.

If you're turning in a crammed elevator you could be momentarily pressing multiple buttons with your backpack. That would most definitely be annoying for everyone.

Did you merge two comments together?

oh shit I did. I doubt elevators run KDE or have dual core processors lol

If they don’t already I wouldn’t doubt it happening in a few years…

This is how the elevators work at Apple Park. I have never seen it work anywhere else, but I've never tried in Japan.

Elevators are ridiculously configurable. I know there are the famous talks on firefighter mode etc., but is there any in-depth presentation, manual explaining the configuration options, or other documentation for all the ways an elevator can be set up?

For example, I suspect all of these cheat codes can be enabled or disabled based on wishes by the building owner, and aside from parameters like how long the door stays open, the dispatching strategies can be configured too. Seeing the options and the thoughts that go into choosing a configuration would be super interesting.

“From the Pit to the Penthouse” gives a lot of insight. All from a hacker perspective, but fascinating and fun.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOzrJjdZDRQ

Yes, that's a great talk but unfortunately just a different edition of the one I meant.

Long press for some european elevators, also for some worked on the OUTSIDE button, i.e. you could override the route of an elevator from someone else who had called it earlier

In the old World Financial Center in downtown NYC, you could cancel all calls by pressing 3 floors simultaneously.

Not super useful if there were other people in the car. But useful if you were by yourself.

Another cool thing is that most elevators have a phone line. It's used for the emergency button but usually also accepts inbound commands. In our old office building the installers had written the number in pencil and I called it a few times. It answered. Unfortunately it didn't activate the speaker, there must be some code. Because this would have been amazing to play practical jokes on my friends.

I tried some basic DTMF but couldn't figure it out, sadly..

Oh wow I wish I had known about this in my last trip to Japan.

I entered an elevator with 2 friends, we were talking, and by accident I came in contact with the buttons. These were all sensor buttons, so without any pressure I had just triggered (almost) all floors, much to the delight of my friends (and even some of the other people in the elevator). As we had to go to the 10th or 11th floor, needless to say that it was quite embarassing ;-)

Don't feel bad. Capacitive buttons are just a really bad idea in an elevator crammed full of people as the people tend to do (and especially the Japanese judging by their metros). This is the designer's fault.

Of course the other passengers may not feel that way.

Why not a simple toggle? Just press the button again once to cancel. Seems way more useful then secret codes.

People might press their floor even if its selected And by the time they correct their mistake the elevator might start doing something else.

That can be used for good: avoid embarrassment and prevent an unnecessary stop.

But it can also be used for evil: cancel a valid stop that someone commanded and hope they don't notice.

And on the opposite-of-polite side, supposedly there's cheat codes for bypassing floors where someone is waiting for the elevator.

Does the elevator speaker play “GOD MODE” when you do that?

On some elevators you can hold the door shut button when the elevator stops at a floor to let someone on.

This could actually be useful and "polite" when you are in a full elevator. Often times there will be a packed elevator going to ground but it needs to stop+open+wait+close on every floor even though nobody can fit in. This just reduces throughput and can make rush periods stretch on for a long time.

I've always wondered if elevators code detect when they were full and avoid stopping for outside requests. Some combination of total weight + weight change could likely be a heuristic that improves performance overall.

I feel canceling floors is unsafe and can permit abusive use of the elevator by predators of all sorts.

Just hate it when a bobcat is hogging the elevator.

Or any of the elevators at Miramax and The Weinstein Company.

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