fyrstormer
Banned
Like everyone else who's just gotten a Tri-V, I've been playing with mine pretty much nonstop while I've been awake. Being an engineer specializing in human-computer interaction, I've got some thoughts on the way the knob works.
Various user-interface laws whose formal names I don't remember right now state that the easiest knob positions to access will be the ones at the ends of its rotation, because the user can fling the knob until it stops rotating with no need for more precision than that. Since OFF occupies one of the end positions, the easiest settings to access from OFF will be rotating the knob a single click, and rotating the knob all the way to the opposite end of its rotation.
For the 005 and 007, this is fine because the user interface only controls brightness, which is a more-or-less linear setting: if the brightness isn't enough, rotate the knob more; if it's too much, rotate it back a bit; if something went bump in the night, fling the knob to Position 6; if you need to shut the light off real fast, fling it back to Position 0.
The Tri-V is more complex, however, since the knob not only selects brightness but also selects which emitter is turned on. So having two easily-accessible settings out of 6 is certainly not ideal. Anything that would make more settings easily-accessible would be better. If I understand how the knob and the STFu driver interact, every setting is ultimately controlled by software even if the user can't change all of them, so my suggestion should be doable:
Move OFF to the center position.
Why? Because if OFF is in the center position, then both of the easily-accessible end positions become usable to store emitter/brightness settings, and there will also be two rotate-one-click positions as well, one on each side of the OFF position. That makes 4 of the 6 ON positions easy to access, and the remaining two are just two clicks away from OFF, which means they're not exactly difficult to access in a hurry either. So by moving OFF to the center, all of the ON positions become easier to access, and the user doesn't have to scroll through more than two settings in either direction to get to the one they want, unlike the current setup which requires scrolling through up to 5 settings to get to the one they want.
It could be pointed out that putting OFF in the center makes it the hardest setting to access in a hurry, and that is certainly true, and I would care about such things in a tactical situation where I might need to shut my light off as fast as possible to avoid detection. But, IMO, if I were in a tactical situation, I would not be using a light with a scroll knob in the first place, I'd be using a simple on-off clicky light instead. For non-tactical situations, I think making the light as easy as possible to turn on to the setting the user wants is much more important.
Food for thought. If reprogramming of the driver were necessary to make this work, I'd be willing to donate my light as a testbed for the new firmware.
Various user-interface laws whose formal names I don't remember right now state that the easiest knob positions to access will be the ones at the ends of its rotation, because the user can fling the knob until it stops rotating with no need for more precision than that. Since OFF occupies one of the end positions, the easiest settings to access from OFF will be rotating the knob a single click, and rotating the knob all the way to the opposite end of its rotation.
For the 005 and 007, this is fine because the user interface only controls brightness, which is a more-or-less linear setting: if the brightness isn't enough, rotate the knob more; if it's too much, rotate it back a bit; if something went bump in the night, fling the knob to Position 6; if you need to shut the light off real fast, fling it back to Position 0.
The Tri-V is more complex, however, since the knob not only selects brightness but also selects which emitter is turned on. So having two easily-accessible settings out of 6 is certainly not ideal. Anything that would make more settings easily-accessible would be better. If I understand how the knob and the STFu driver interact, every setting is ultimately controlled by software even if the user can't change all of them, so my suggestion should be doable:
Move OFF to the center position.
Why? Because if OFF is in the center position, then both of the easily-accessible end positions become usable to store emitter/brightness settings, and there will also be two rotate-one-click positions as well, one on each side of the OFF position. That makes 4 of the 6 ON positions easy to access, and the remaining two are just two clicks away from OFF, which means they're not exactly difficult to access in a hurry either. So by moving OFF to the center, all of the ON positions become easier to access, and the user doesn't have to scroll through more than two settings in either direction to get to the one they want, unlike the current setup which requires scrolling through up to 5 settings to get to the one they want.
It could be pointed out that putting OFF in the center makes it the hardest setting to access in a hurry, and that is certainly true, and I would care about such things in a tactical situation where I might need to shut my light off as fast as possible to avoid detection. But, IMO, if I were in a tactical situation, I would not be using a light with a scroll knob in the first place, I'd be using a simple on-off clicky light instead. For non-tactical situations, I think making the light as easy as possible to turn on to the setting the user wants is much more important.
Food for thought. If reprogramming of the driver were necessary to make this work, I'd be willing to donate my light as a testbed for the new firmware.
I also think that the knob is so tactile and easy to operate that just maybe using the side of a finger to roll it back and forth to the desired setting is easy enough.
