Timely thread. I got a few new Emisars last night, and I was wondering what the heck they were doing when I turned them off. Now I know it’s the POVD.
agree the mental overhead from using fluctuating mixed Aux Voltage Colors is excessive.
imo it would make more sense if POVD just showed Green for Good or Red for Recharge 
As it is now, POVD shows Blue for Good and Green for Recharge… thats an illogical way of using Green…
but, that was not the question… LOL
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It’s not the only option many users might want to change. On the other hand, if all features were hidden, many people would never discover them. It’s kind of normal for products to enable most functions by default to show what is possible.
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thank you for pointing out that perspective.
Maybe keep POVD enabled by default in Advanced Mode, but disabled by default in Simple Mode?
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It makes sense if you are surrounded by rainbows all day.
I don’t think people asked for that color scheme.
That’s kinda the problem. “We” can go through this process for a flashlight, but most normies would just be stuck with it just the same way as if we got stuck with a custom immutable UI that we have issues with (blinkies in the main cycle, forced to start on high, etc.).
Worse, the arm-twisting that mfrs get when asking for input is the clamoring for UIs that practically need a PhD in flashlightology to operate let alone configure.
(Then there’s the level of armtwisting that demands the UI and the flashpads to load a whole new OS onto the light. Great for the tweakers but less than useless for normies (who probably buy 99% of the lights). “We” are the only ones who care about that. I like lights, but I couldn’t care less, as I’m not about to get arsed enough to do that.)
We get the ¼ in drills when people just want the ¼ in holes.
Even with my TS10 that’s resting at 3.whatever volts, crank it up a bit and it’ll step down lower and lower. Turn it off and blink out the voltage, and it might read 3.0V or 3.1V. Wait a few seconds and do it again, and it’ll be 3.3V, where it’ll more or less stay. Reminds me of those “gas-mileage” gauges cars had that just measure vacuum. In my sister’s old car, I was getting 99mpg according to that gauge! Reality begged to differ, though. A bad gauge is worse than no gauge.
And I absolutely agree with the comment that it’d suck SO bad to be looking in around in moonlight/firefly mode and then turn it off, only to get blasted in the face with a technicolor voltage display. If I were a normie, I’d swear off the OS and the whole product line of whatever mfr would stick it on there.
Just thinking about the whole POVD thing, dunno, but it sounds like a solution looking for a problem. Or like the saying goes, just because something could be done, doesn’t mean that it should be done.
But hey, I’m just a glass-half-empty kinda guy.
If people insist on including that “feature”, howbow having it turned on in tweaker mode, but turned off by default in retardo mode? This way normies don’t have to suffer with it out of the box?
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This might not really change anything, as iirc e.g. Hank ships with Advanced Mode enabled, and Simple Mode is enabled by default only after a Factory Reset. So at least in some cases, initially, POVD would still come up.
And that’s the reason i generally dislike Anduril (no disrespect intended towards developers).
I mean i absolutely love the idea, FOSS flashlight firmware and everything.
But rampant feature creep and force-feeding people new features like POVD (have to enable it by default so that everybody knows it is there) kills it for me.
Flashlights are not my only hobby. I have a 3D printer, laser cutter/engraver, i like to mess around with electronics, etc. Updating firmware, learning some tricks and reading mile-long manuals and changelogs is fun for a short while, but then… it gets old and i simply want a functional device. Because i simply do not have enough time to keep following all the stuff for all the devices i have. And current iteration of Anduril, sadly, fails to deliver.
My general opinion how stuff should work is - keep default experience consistent. So that if i update firmware it works exactly the same as old one. New features like POVD should be off by default. People who want it will find it in changelogs or on forums. People who do not care will not be bothered by it. Everybody wins.
And… I was initially tricked by POVD into thinking it is a fault of some sort too and asked about this on reddit, getting whole bunch of not nice “RTFM” replies. People just can not understand that the fact person can figure something out does not mean they want to spend time/effort doing it.
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That’s why I have zero use for The Reddit, because it tends to be filled with holier-than-thou asswipes who treat anyone “not on their level” as decidedly less-than, and with contempt.
And from what I’ve heard (thirdhand, as I refuse to go there unless something random pops up on goggle that I’m searching for), moderation is inconsistent, capricious, agenda-driven, and sometimes just purely random. Posts get deleted for no reason, people get auto-banned just based on what other r/groups they sub to, and worse. Screw that noise…
So yeah, new feature just pops up out of nowhere, you ask if there’s a glitch, and get snotty "RTFM!"s in response? Doesn’t surprise me.
Drills vs holes again. People shouldn’t have to study up on what’s in new versions, upgrades, etc., to avoid unpleasant “surprises”. Even little stoopit things like what happens when you, say, 2click to turbo… or is it just ceiling? Another 2click to turbo? Then a 1click. Off, or back to memorised brightness? Aaaauugh!!
Different lights had different behavior like that. So even using the same OS, but different versions of it, can have the dreaded Unpredictable Results. Switch lights, and you’d better play with it a while to figure out those quirks. Swap what’s your EDC light often, and you can get dizzy trying to keep track.
I think my TS10 is the only Andy light that I have in rotation. Closest is my GTmicro which runs Narsim, my MH20, and a few Sofirns/Wurkkoses that have mfr-specific UIs, not Andy.
In fact, out of all the lights I got in my at-the-ready bundle, I can’t think of any lights that run Andy except for my TS10. Oh, my SP10-whatever that runs it, but being that I got my TS10, I kinda reboxed that for safe-keeping, too. I even reboxed my FCs (11s/12s/13s) because I got enough more than tubelights in rotation.
Me, I just care about the holes, not the drills. Hell, my Kitchen Light is the dreaded Tacklife with diffusion film. I treat it as on/off only. Never click to medium or low, and get pist when it accidentally starts strobing. It’s just A Light. I’m more interested in the hole than the drill. I don’t need 95CRI with high R9 and below-the-BBL tint if I’m just checking the floor to see if a cat puked and to avoid stepping in it.
But hey, if people want candle mode or lightning mode or POVD or other cutesy clown-suits for their lights, that’s fine, as long as they don’t get in the way of other useful stuff, and don’t surprise people at inopportune times.
Whatever happened to KISS? (No, not the Gene Simmons kind…)
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While i have several anduril lights, they don’t all behave the same. It was very confusing at first, mainly because one had to research it and there is highly variable information out there.
Not to mention the timeliness of the information.
This brings up the bigger question:
Does the industry need a standard to regularize UIs?
And up the ante/enforcement on the sheer amounts of bs involved in the industry?
There’s just so many approaches to the issues and i do believe flashlights should have a basic mode that is standard, easily accessible and understandable to an 8yr old.
SAFE RELIABLE ACCESSIBLE UNIVERSAL
just like usbc and windows!
Rofl rofl rofl
So any flashlight can be used by anyone in an emergency.
It’s the wild west(&east, north,south) out there, kids
I
It’s quite a diverse world out there and it seems flashlights, evolving from ye olde candle and lantern
ARE
turning into smartphones
At least my flying car is being delivered Tuesday (pending recalls and software updates notwithstanding the robot refuses to work if i stand on one foot)
All that being said,
It stays cuz it’s already there
I do like to tinker. Many do not.
Anduril may ultimately kill itself due to incomprehensiblity to many.
Independent of personal preferences (for example, I am a happy user of the POVD as is by default, and this poll is helpful in showing me that I am in the clear minority with this, fair enough), in my view it is important to have a proper documentation of the current status.
So I would like to point out that over at GitHub, there is a pull request by wolfgirl42/SiteRelEnby to i.a. add an FAQ to the manual, which starts off with, guess what… The POVD:
Here is a direct link to the fork of the manual with this proposed FAQ (please note this is NOT in the current version of TK’s manual). Adding this Q&A to the manual might be of help, regarding how often this exact question seems to be coming up.
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I can’t vote. Do I disable it? Yes. But went I receive a new Anduril light, part of the fun is actually the personalisation I do. I will need to adjust a few settings based on preferences no matter this POVD is enabled or not.
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In minor defence of Reddit (and I agree that there are some nasty types on there) at one point there was someone asking this exact same question at least once a day on r/flashlight and r/hanklights. Sometimes you’d only need to scroll down two or three posts to find the answer. It doesn’t excuse being rude but I can see why people got annoyed by having to keep explaining POVD over and over.
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I didn’t know about the feature till i received my ts10 max. Had a wtf moment, i suspected what it was before checking the instructions, liked it, kept it.
I’m not sure what muggles would make of it but as a flashlight community who apparently like advanced features i might’ve thought it’s a pretty small gripe to turn it off.
Look forward to the day we can make infinite adjustments via smart phones and we can gripe about having to scroll the extra 2 finger swipes…
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Oh, nooo… :-). Let spades be spades, and shovels be shovels.
On the Anduril front, how do you feel about replacing the button with dials? :-)
Yeah, like this or like this:
Anything but multifunction buttons - even if somewhat programmable :-). It seems to have worked well in the evolution of digital cameras’ UI, just took over a decade to transcend the seemingly inevitable button madness.
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The only dials that have interested me in the past were infinitely variable brightness. These other multi function lights not so much.
If however dials were used to navigate andruil, it would depend on the implementation. It could be a good thing… or not. Maybe that’s why it took 10 years to refine camera buttons…?
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I’d rather navigate the light than the Anduril… :-)
… or a bit of both > 4 position dial
1 ramp
2 mom
3 programming
4 aux programming
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