The changing thickness of manuals

[Jeff_Birt]

(12-07-2022 06:52 PM)Maximilian Hohmann Wrote:  With my present car the only time I had to look into the manual, which I had downloaded to my iPad even before going to the dealer to collect the car, was to find out how to disable the annoying automatic windshield wipers...

I use the owner's manuals of my cars quite often to look up things like proper lubricants, types of bulbs, etc. About a year ago I bought a second-hand Mini Countryman and a month or so later realized there was an idiot light illuminated, on the upper center console, having to do with the passenger side airbag. The 'universal' icon used gave no real indication if the light was signifying a normal operating condition or a malfunction (i.e. thinking there is a small passenger in the seat and shutting off the airbag.)

Searching online revealed that on some years of cars Mini chose to make the light indicate an error condition and on other years it indicated normal operation. Brilliant. The owner's manual was useless as it never just did come out and say what the bloody light meant. I had to get out my scan tool and interrogate the passenger seat weight sensor to see when it sensed no passenger, a small passenger and a regular passenger. Then I could watch the status of the light while looking at sensor data to divine what the bloody light meant.

Turns out the light was illuminated when the seat was in 'normal' condition and off when the airbag was deactivated. One clear sentence in the owner's manual calling out the function of each idiot light would have made it abundantly clear.

[Maximilian Hohmann]

Hello!

(12-07-2022 07:27 PM)Jeff_Birt Wrote:  ... realized there was an idiot light illuminated....

There were plenty of those lights illuminated on my car after I drove it home from the dealer (of course it is not a new car, how can a normal person afford a new car whilst spending so much money on old calculators ;-) ). The solution was not found in the manual, so I bought a cloned diagnostic interface on the internet called "Lexia", which seems to work with many french cars. This allowed me to turn off the most annoying annunciator lights. Occasioanlly my car will tell me stuff like "Suspension défaillate" or "Système anti-pollution moteur défaiilant" on it's screen, but the messages go away on their own after a short while and it keeps on going just the same. Just like on the plane I fly at work :-)

Regards
Max

[Siegfried]

(12-07-2022 06:52 PM)Maximilian Hohmann Wrote:  Maybe. But on the other hand, the need for documentation is not as big as it used to be. Since many years, Apple does not supply any (visible) documentation with their products (computers, phones, tablets) because they spend a lot of money to create an intuitive user interface.

I don't think I have either, except for some tips in magazines, but I strongly suspect that I don't use half of the functions that Apple added to iOS and MacOS since I joined at iOS4 and Snow Leopard. They sometimes offer popups or tutorials but they usually come up when I have something else to do and probably my memory isn't as good as it used to be so i probably forget most of those tips and stuff it shows me (or I'm wired to learn in a different way).

I like to thumb through old spiral-bound calculator manuals and marvel at how small the manuals for some earlier models (like a newly acquired HP55 but also the HP67) are while later models like the HP29C have markedly larger ones. I still regret throwing away my HP15C manual after having forgotten the calculator at work and it having disappeared. I have a whole shelf full of them but still find them more enjoyable than PDFs (although I'm thankful they exist as buying missing manuals is just too expensive these days when repro manuals are sold for more than real ones went for a year or two ago.)

I don't do margin notes myself but also think they add "flair" to used manuals. My favourite is a set of HP41CX manuals with a nice, thick homemade paper cover with titles typed on a manual typewriter.

[Siegfried]

(12-07-2022 06:52 PM)Maximilian Hohmann Wrote:  Maybe. But on the other hand, the need for documentation is not as big as it used to be. Since many years, Apple does not supply any (visible) documentation with their products (computers, phones, tablets) because they spend a lot of money to create an intuitive user interface.

I don't think I have either, except for some tips in magazines, but I strongly suspect that I don't use half of the functions that Apple added to iOS and MacOS since I joined at iOS4 and Snow Leopard. They sometimes offer popups or tutorials but they usually come up when I have something else to do and probably my memory isn't as good as it used to be so i probably forget most of those tips and stuff it shows me (or I'm wired to learn in a different way).

I like to thumb through old spiral-bound calculator manuals and marvel at how small the manuals for some earlier models (like a newly acquired HP55 but also the HP67) are while later models like the HP29C have markedly larger ones. I still regret throwing away my HP15C manual after having forgotten the calculator at work and it having disappeared. I have a whole shelf full of them but still find them more enjoyable than PDFs (although I'm thankful they exist as buying missing manuals is just too expensive these days when repro manuals are sold for more than real ones went for a year or two ago.)

I don't do margin notes myself but also think they add "flair" to used manuals. My favourite is a set of HP41CX manuals with a nice, thick homemade paper cover with titles typed on a manual typewriter.

[Bill (Smithville NJ)]

(12-07-2022 07:27 PM)Jeff_Birt Wrote:  Searching online revealed that on some years of cars Mini chose to make the light indicate an error condition and on other years it indicated normal operation. Brilliant. The owner's manual was useless as it never just did come out and say what the bloody light meant. I had to get out my scan tool and interrogate the passenger seat weight sensor to see when it sensed no passenger, a small passenger and a regular passenger. Then I could watch the status of the light while looking at sensor data to divine what the bloody light meant.

Turns out the light was illuminated when the seat was in 'normal' condition and off when the airbag was deactivated. One clear sentence in the owner's manual calling out the function of each idiot light would have made it abundantly clear.

Reminds me of the control panel on the Three Mile Island Nuclear Plant. During the testimony of the Presidential Commission on the TMI accident, a control operator was asked to describe what he did when he came on duty. He said his first job was to verify that the control panel was in the correct operation. He said he did this by picking up the control manual and then verifying that each light was showing the correct signal and that each switch was in the correct position.

The control panel was NOT designed to show all green lights when operating within parameters. So some would be green when in parameter and some would be red when in parameter. Thus the the need to compare the panel with the manual.

Just a side note: Whenever the TMI had an error, it would quickly cascade into many hundreds of other errors. The control operator said the printer was so slow that it would get so far behind in printing the errors out that they would just unplug the printer and then turn it back on so that it would begin printing the currently occurring errors again. Of course they then lost the history of all the errors.

Hopefully newer Nuclear Plants have better designed control boards.

73
Bill WD9EQD
Smithville, NJ

[rprosperi]

(12-09-2022 09:54 PM)Bill (Smithville NJ) Wrote:  Hopefully newer Nuclear Plants have better designed control boards.

73
Bill WD9EQD
Smithville, NJ

Or at the very least spring for some much faster printers...

[Jeff_Birt]

(12-09-2022 09:54 PM)Bill (Smithville NJ) Wrote:  Hopefully newer Nuclear Plants have better designed control boards.

73
Bill WD9EQD
Smithville, NJ

I don't know...I laid out one of the PCBs currently running our nuclear reactor on campus

[Bill (Smithville NJ)]

(12-10-2022 12:19 AM)rprosperi Wrote:  

(12-09-2022 09:54 PM)Bill (Smithville NJ) Wrote:  Hopefully newer Nuclear Plants have better designed control boards.

73
Bill WD9EQD
Smithville, NJ

Or at the very least spring for some much faster printers...

I was just rereading some of the testimony from the hearings and one thing struck me as strange (as it did the panel investigation). The control panel had a light that showed that a signal had been sent to the valve to close, but there was NO switch on the valve that would send a signal back stating that the valve was actually in the closed position. It was concluded that having a closed position switch and indicator would have helped the operators determine what was actually going on. But the operations were left with seeing that pressures were rising/falling, temperatures rising/falling to make the determination that the valve was not fully closed or fully opened. It was a classic case of having indicator lights that would show what signals had been sent but never verified that the action was actually completed.

As an HVAC designer, we learned to not only show what signal was sent to a valve/damper, but to also have position switches that would actually indicate the the required action was completed. This is especially true where we might want a damper to be fully open before actually starting the fan. Likewise valves fully open before starting the pumps.

73 Bill WD9EQD
Smithville, NJ

[John Galt]

(12-07-2022 08:12 PM)Maximilian Hohmann Wrote:  ... but the messages go away on their own after a short while and it keeps on going just the same. Just like on the plane I fly at work :-)

ECAM? ?