3 ms·
As someone who's done some time in embedded, that sounds like they needed a repair menu and didn't want to add a dedicated number pad. It's a fairly typical sol
by AlotOfReading 5y ago
As someone who's done some time in embedded, that sounds like they needed a repair menu and didn't want to add a dedicated number pad. It's a fairly typical solution. Similarly, these expensive industrial machines with lots of moving parts often have a whole bunch of tunable parameters somewhere. Setting these parameters incorrectly can sometimes make the product unsafe or self-destructive, so it's often a good idea to secure access.
There may very well be obfuscation here, but the technician menu doesn't really demonstrate it to me. The lack of repair franchising/certification is more problematic, but that's the most of the industry at this point.
- HeyLaughingBoy 5y agoI agree (also from a career in embedded). People forget that before Bluetooth Low Energy and everyone walking around with cheap, sophisticated computers in their pockets, putting an easily navigable menu on a machine that didn't otherwise need one was expensive. If your machine didn't need a keypad or a display in normal operation, you simply wouldn't have one. Maybe you'd show error codes by blinking an LED in a certain pattern. These days, it's cheap to have an available BLE connection to a cell phone that can provide a nice text or graphical control screen to tell you everything you need to know about the machine. A lot of the cost is in the UI and that gets offloaded to the the user's phone.