pidtuner
commented
5 years ago Hi George,
Thank you for the great feedback (pun intended), I did not realize this obvious UI flaw. But you are right, when typing enter might be the first intuitive thing to do for one person, it might not be the other. I will consider finding a more user-friendy way to update the graph for the next release (when I find the time).
Let us know how your tuning goes. Happy tuning!
Thanks for producing a great online PID tuner. This issue may sound stupid but it actually took me a while to work out that I needed to press enter, after changing a PID gain value, in order to get the graph to update.
Initially, I changed the gain values and tabbed between the fields and then looked around for a button named e.g. Update. I didn't see any obvious way to update the graph to reflect the changes I'd made.
I tried various stupid things before trying enter - so, while it may seem obvious once you know it, perhaps it's worth pointing out that one has to press enter in a given field in order to update the graph. Or add focus listeners that update the graph when the user leaves a field (e.g. by tabbing out or clicking on another field).
Your tuner is also a very nice way for beginners to experiment with the effects of altering the P, I and D values - so it might also be an idea to also package it on its own as a simple simulator. I.e. present the last step as a tool in itself - where users just work against the canned data and adjust the gain values to get an insight into how each affects the output, perhaps with some very brief text below to guide the user a little bit (there are endless introductory pages out there on PID controllers, so I don't mean reproducing one of those, I just mean maybe a one-liner for each field outlining what users should try and can expect from adjusting that field).