Introduction

01 Oct 2023 -

Good controls are invisible

What constitutes good controls, anyways? Nobody cares. Seriously! A counterintuitive hallmark of a controls job done well is that it fades out of sight.

Think about the last time you walked into a dark room. Did you locate the nearest 1/100th of an inch wire, call up the closest power plant with extra capacity, and carefully arrange for a half billion billion electrons to scream through a hundreds of wires and switches pass right past your finger, and target them to exactly the right spot to emit radiation in all directions? Probably not - you just flipped the light switch. (For those of you that do think about such things, get in touch! you sound interesting)

How about the last time you used cruise control on the highway? Did you measure the tire width, multiply by how many thousands of times per minute the engine’s pistons are flying back and forth, calculate how many thousands of tiny explosions you want to move those pistons, and manipulate a bunch of valves to get everything to line up? Nah, you just set 60 MPH.

Good controls are simple

Effective controls look simple, which means only the ineffective ones are noticed. The best ones take a difficult set of problems and reduce it to a simple set of solutions. This can lead to a bias, often subconscious, towards complexity. A well-done solution is misunderstood as the problem being easy; conversely, a poor but complex solution is misunderstood as a very difficult problem. In this blog I hope to examine some interesting controls problems, as well as methods of working on them.

Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells better." -- E.W. Djikstra