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Comment by surfingdino | Hacker News Reader

It's proof positive that there exists a generation of devs who have never seen a physical user interface made of buttons, knobs, or sliders. E for effort.

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Someone has a (3d render?) better concept indeed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nGCihgndng

(the original page is now 404)

I was thinking it would be this one!

That looks amazing!

I wonder what happens if you press the EQ or PL buttons. :)

The whole front facade needs to rotate like James Bond's license plate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QXCWW--DlY&t=45

Naw a whole nother panel that has to pop out on a swing boom like transformers - complete with an array of luminous self motivated sliders and a dropdown for presets that pops out like an actual oled panel for the list of presets that pops back in again once you make your selection!

What hardware do you need to make the slider? Other than that and finding displays of the correct dimensions, with a 3D printer it should be pretty simple to make.

Motorised faders have been available for decades https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPXeULcDa5w

Indeed, and some are relatively inexpensive: https://www.aliexpress.us/item/1005004808214900.html

My favorite demo of motorized faders, also in the context of audio (M4 Motor fader controller for eurorack):

https://youtu.be/VOcJ3yufxtU?t=357

That is so cool.

Off the shelf slide potentiometer would do it

Slider for the song position needs to go both ways: You can move it to change current time or it moves automatically along with the song

Motorized slider. Can be used to do just that.

You only need one display still. Or maybe two smaller ones? Anyway, the frame can go over the display and mask the rest of it.

I love this concept, I'm going to make this.

Please do and show us! Would love to see one in real life.

I will! Apparently it's not as easy as I thought (because of the progress bar) but I'll try regardless!

Archive of the original page:

https://web.archive.org/web/20230522141639/https://www.rickg...

The message about stolen artwork is most unfortunate.

I literally did a double take reading this. The very possibility that an adult in the world has never interacted with analog controls on anything more complex than a toaster trips me out a bit. Like, how in the hell has software driven UI (with all of the problems that entails) managed to take over? Why must literally everything suck?

It's just vastly cheaper unfortunately. Manufacturing buttons requires investing in moulds, etc. and then iterating on a design is very expensive.

Is it really? Touchscreens and the tech stack to drive them aren't exactly simplistic. A handful of simple switches and a few rheostats seems like it'd be cheaper if for no other reason they don't invoke the avalanche of dumb shit that kicks off whenever software is brought into a project.

Labor also isn't getting cheaper, and someone has to assemble and test all those switches. You can automate... but LCD touchscreen is simpler.

I strongly doubt mass produced commodity components like switches are hand assembled or individually tested. It's typical for random samples, say one in a thousand, to be pulled from a batch for testing.

If you are asking which of these things is more likely:

A) The developer chose a touch screen to make the build easier and cheaper

B) The developer has never seen physical buttons

The answer is A)

You think it's faster to get a bunch of switches and rheostats, CAD components so that they fit together while looking like a Winamp skin that looks like a physical device, get them manufactured, test them, do the above five more times to get everything perfect, sand/paint the components to get the specific look, and wire them all up than to throw some CSS lines and HTML elements on a screen?

Honestly since I don't do UI, yes. I also think it's a little weird to think that is particularly difficult. It's really not.

I didn't say "difficult", I said "faster". I do both, and CSS is an order of magnitude faster, maybe more.

Ok but most of the things you listed don't need to be done. You don't need CAD or custom manufactured parts. Just some model paint. If you want to get nitty gritty about it you left out language support, accessibility, unit tests, version control, and documentation out of the UI portion.

How am I going to make the little buttons, the frame, the rails for the pots, etc? If I have to 3D print them, I need to model them.

Some metal and a drill and a tape measure. What ever did people do before 3d printers?

You can buy all of these things. None of that needs to be custom made.

For a one-off project probably not, for the larger ecosystem time's going to get spent on case design and debugging manufacturing regardless so any gains there are a rounding error. That said I've seen talented designers spend weeks chasing cross-browser bugs and I knew a guy who could lay out and solder an entire mixing board over a long weekend so I'm not convinced the time savings are real.

1) Economies of scale. One touchscreen factory replaces arbitrary number of switches and sliders and buttons of all shape and size.

2) Who says anything about touchscreens? Most touch interfaces your interact with aren't displays - they're capacitive buttons. Think your induction stove, or a powerbank, or any other random device you have to touch just right to turn on. Capacitive buttons are dumb pieces of solid-state electronics. Zero moving parts. Zero things to break (except maybe status LED that shines through them so you know where to touch). Cheap as dirt.

The future sucks because it wasn't created for improved quality or functionality - it was created because it was cheaper than the old-school way before it.

Because slapping a touchscreen or an OLED gets you out of the inconvenience of making stuff repairable. "Just chuck it out" because it's impossible to actually repair a touch screen is way more convenient and cheaper for the manufacturer to do than making their products repairable. Look at the modern disposable camera lenses. Even the most expensive ones have no manual controls, but are full of motors and displays making them way less future proof and actually unrepairable.

Tempus fugit. I still get taken aback when someone reminds me 1990s weren't 10 years ago. There's a whole generation of adults now, who grew up with touchscreens. Original iPhone release date isn't perhaps the best milestone here, but arguably the most well known one, and it happened - I can't really believe what I'm writing - 16 years ago.

So yes, it's totally possible for someone doing tech today to have never interacted with complex analog interfaces since being a little kid. Still unlikely for the next couple years, but possible.

How is it not blindingly obvious yet? It's money. Everything sucks because you aren't an executive or a shareholder. Everything sucks because everything isn't for you, it's to extract money from you. And places like this are the Mos Eisley cantina where everyone talks about the best way to do that.

I was so disappointed as well when I saw he just grabbed a screen and called it a day.

I was really expecting some mechanical tricks around the play/pause buttons liked I had on my old cassette player to make them xor-like .. so disappointed. And frustrated I just don't have the skills or time to make one but would love to see someone actually do it.

Since this is like ten of the top ten comments here, complaining that it's not physical, I'd like to point out that physical controls are expensive. Slide pots are about a dollar: https://www.digikey.co.uk/en/products/detail/bourns-inc/PTA2... ; if you want a motorized one, that's way more.

Pushbuttons are similar. The XOR system is literally "radio buttons" or "ganged switches", but I can no longer find that exact item on catalogues. It works by having a bar hooked around all the switches so that when one is halfway-pressed it triggers the unlock across all switches, so the unused one pops out.

Then you need to hook all that up to your microcontroller as inputs, do panel cutouts, etc. The switches tend to be through-hole, complicating manufacturing. Then you discover that you end up needing two boards, one full of inputs and display parts which are through-hole so there isn't space on the back for the actual MCU.

>I'd like to point out that physical controls are expensive.

Do you guys not have money?

Not enough, no.

I can provide you with a PayPal username of you wanna get rid of some 8-)

This will cost $15 in materials for seven buttons, two sliders, and two screens. The "they're expensive!" argument makes sense when you're making a mass-produced item, but for a one-off art piece, $15 won't break the bank.

> I'd like to point out that physical controls are expensive

More expensive than a touchscreen? Especially if we also calculate the energy-costs for usage..

I agree there's a lot that would go into it. Which is why I was so disappointed with the implementation.

As someone who watches content from This Old Tony, Inheritance Machining, GreatScott!, Marius Hornberger and so on I would watch a series of someone building this. That's how I see you can subsidize a project like this these days.

The complaints stem from the fact that the title says it was physical. If the title was "winamp made of diamond" but it was made of plastic instead, it wouldn't help to tell us diamond is expensive. We know physical is more expensive/difficult, that's why we got excited when the title promised it, and then felt let down.

> xor-like

Radio buttons?

I mean .. brain fart?

yes, I meant radio buttons. of course!

I'm laughing so hard at myself now.

I quite like 'XOR buttons'. I wasn't intending to correct you; just to point out that those buttons have a name that originates precisely from the application we're talking about (well... Winamp's not a radio per se, but close enough).

"... and I'll take three floating point controls too"

"You mean sliders?"

What html calls range, like in deranged.

There’s a reason xor interface buttons are called “radio buttons“.

I definitely remember reading some folk etymology that claimed they were so named because the buttons affected each other despite being physically separate, "as if by radio".

"Like buttons on a car radio" seems more plausible to me however.

A massive overstatement. Even ignoring everything else, cars may have started down the touchscreen route (which is insane for anything the driver is using), but that is recent and not universal still. I can't believe there is a professional dev today that hasn't seen a few cars with physical user interfaces.

Perhaps the developer wanted to support skins this way. /s

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