MAN / MACHINE INTERFACES

This is a real story.

Back in the days, I worked for a small company that built EGSEs (short for Electric Ground Support Equipment) for civil and military satellites built by Airbus, Thales Alenia, Leonardo and others. The hardware was designed by my boss, a bitter and harsh but incredibly brilliant man, and I was responsible for the software interfaces, networking and remote control systems. Basically, we built human-height racks full to the top with COTS transponders, multimeters, power supplies, RF connectors, etc, and custom-built small Linux systems that coordinated the hardware; on the other side, this monster was commanded from a GUI in a standard laptop or desktop computer, that also provided connections to other Central Checkout / Command Control systems, test procedure scripting, and such. Also, our EGSEs used to have a small touchscreen where you could do very basic things like switching attenuators on / off, switching power supplies on / off, and commanding simple things to them like setting current, voltage, PWM, etc. I designed these small screens with the FLTK (Fast Light Toolkit), which was simple and appropriate for this very small systems.

One day, on an extremely hot summer (what the fuck, this is Spain, all summers are extremely hot), I went from my remote desktop to where my boss was working near the rack, and then he said:

"Please stop fucking around with the remote control system while I'm calibrating the power supplies".

"What? I did no such thing. I was [...whatever I was doing, I don't remember what]"

"Please. I was working when I heard the CLACK of the power supply switching off. I saw the logs and it was software-triggered."

"Maybe a temperature threshold, it's hot as fuck here."

"No. Software-triggered."

"Oh, sorry, then. Maybe I broke something, I'll go check my code."

Next day, I was already there by the rack with my boss. We were discussing something, and then we both heard the CLACK of the power supply going off again.

"Holy fucking Christ", said by boss.

"The remote control is disabled right now, the desktop is not even running, so I'm not to blame", said I, slightly relieved.

There was much swearing, as we were, as always, over the project deadline.

My boss then said:

"Whatever, our client has requested some more information in the rack's screen. I've sent you an email with the details."

I moved to my desktop, checked my email, and there was no message from my boss. I emailed the client and, yes, they wanted some more telemetries to be shown in the already crammed space. So I rewrote the small touchscreen main dialog (FLTK tools are cumbersome but effective), rebuilt and deployed it.

I moved to the rack. The air conditioning was buzzing like a small hurricane, the room hot as an oven. I checked how the mini-screen looked (sometimes, what was shown in the development machine didn't always match the real one): everything was OK, the new temperature telemetries were correctly shown near the power supply on-screen buttons.

Also, there was a fly over the screen. Then I joked to my boss:

"Oh, you must look at what I have done: I put a pretty, hyperreal bitmap of a fly on the man / machine interface, come look at it".

The fly moved a little, and then stepped over the power supply OFF touch-screen button.

CLACK

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