jsmcortina wrote:This does highlight a good point - that CRITICAL setting is somehow not obvious enough - any thoughts on how to make it clearer?
James
I've been giving this question quite a bit of thought since yesterday, due the the unfortunate possibility that I might not be the only dumbass.
And of course, as you guys have said, that makes this an important part of the Beta testing process.
Although I don't really have any good suggestions about how you communicate the potential problem to users, here are my thoughts:
First of all, I guess I didn't give a lot of thought to some of the settings that were of the type such as this that seemed to be something that should be a straight transfer across from MS2/Extra to MS3 if the build of my board was a conventional "by the book" build, which mine kind of is. It seems that the difference is that there isn't really any standard when you have done things like the Neon crank wheel mods, and added an extra ignition driver circuit.
Second, it's been several years since I built this board, and since then I've only worked on it to add the IAC jumpers from JS0-JS3 or whatever it is. Other than that I've built a JimStim, and a GPIO board/Megashift, and the rest of my brain has gone to my main hobby of training dogs for French Ringsport and Schutzhund, and to my job, which is very technical in a legal sense. In other words, I've gotten way too foggy on the little bit of knowledge I did once have about the construction of my board, because it's been covered up with other stuff. . . .
Which leads me to making a suggestion about how to avoid people messing up essential elements of the MSQ. Ideally I guess, maybe there could be a bit of an interrogatory set of questions that pop up on the initial setup of the MSQ, that would lead a person through some logic about which questions they need to pay close attention to, and which they could pretty much ignore. This would probably start with the question: "If you are carrying over an MSQ from a prior version of MegaSquirt code, click the appropriate box below for that code version." And then maybe it would lead the person through the high priority settings.
Now that I typed all of that though, I think it would be an insane amount of work to write all of that logic, and the code that would follow, and I'd rather have you guys spend your time on stuff that will make our cars run better, rather than stuff like this that will make it more idiot-proof, if that is even possible. So, my other proposal would be to potentially highlight settings that get messed up by people such as the one I messed up, as those come to light, and maybe force people to choose a setting there. As I alluded to above, I just took it for granted that this relatively unfamiliar setting was just a carry-over from my MS2/Extra MSQ.
Well, that's a lot of reading for you guys, and I'm a bit concerned that it may have been a waste of your time, but it summarizes the thoughts I've had on avoiding this issue for others.
Thad
Put it back in, and back to fast blink.
