Talk:Mad digitizer syndrome

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[edit] Expanding this stub, but not yet...

As a complete “newbie”, I know the following isn’t anywhere near posting to the article’s stub – far too verbose overall, WAY too much opinion in some instances, complete lack of citation for info in others - so I dumped it here in hopes that someone more Wiki-savvy than I might, someday, help hack it into shape. I’ve reworked the original opening paragraph a bit, to more accurately qualify the statements.

As for the rest of it… read on….

"Mad digitizer syndrome" is a bug or condition on older Palm OS device models such as the Sony Clie, Palm Zire, or Handspring Visor that results in a drift of digitizer accuracy. Sometimes, especially if it routinely occurs after the unit is powered off, this can be fixed with the purchase of one of the many "Digi" applications available. Newer models, such as the Zire71, do not have this issue as they have "Digi" applications built in.

Debate has raged for years about the causes of and cures for “Mad Digitizer Syndrome” – is it software or hardware? Unfortunately, as far as I know, the people in the best position to know for certain what’s what (Palm, Inc), still insist (through their Support tech.s) that it’s ALL caused exclusively by “third-party-software”, either incompetently written by the author or incompetently installed/used by the Palm owner. For them, there isn’t even the slightest possibility of it being hardware-related (since this would entail both admitting to an error in design judgment, AND accepting responsibility for the results).

The reason they can get away with it is plausibility: their version of “reality” is absolutely true – IN SOME CASES! There are certain, specific pieces of software which seem to “lose track of” or inadvertently modify the stylus registration data (as well as, apparently, some Palm and other OSs which perform a similar idiocy at power-down). For those people, any one of several “Digi”-compensating app.s would be the indicated specific, a sort of permanent “work-around”, separately retaining the correct positioning bytes and re-poking them back into place when they get skragged by dumb’ware.

Where Palm becomes… shall we say, “disingenuous”? …is in trying to blame ALL digi-drift on software….

My own experience and (certainly not exhaustive, but considerable) meta-analysis of hundreds of chat, ‘board and blog entries make it quite clear that BOTH forms of “M.D.S.” actually do exist, sometimes simultaneously in the same device! (What a lovely diagnostic nightmare! No wonder lay people get kunphyoozed!)

The hardware version seems to have come first, looks to be, by far, the most common (although I can’t definitively substantiate those statements…) and appears to have begun with Palm’s first “sliding-shell” design, the original Tungsten T (now often referred-to as the “T-1”). The mechanical flaw is a weakness in the ribbon cable connecting the edge of the screen/digitizer “sandwich” to the digitizing circuitry behind it: either the bonding at the glass (or plastic) substrate is weak or the ribbon, itself, wrapped around a fairly sharp 180-degree turn, is inferior and begins partially failing-out with time and use.

The design flaw, however, was in choosing to run such extremely delicate, ultra-low-voltage, analog position-sensing, X-Y signals through any kind of cable at all, rather than mounting (or even printing!) said digitizing circuitry directly on the backplane of that “glass’tic sandwich” in the first place, then running the digits through interconnects to the processor! There is so very little electrical difference between “pixel 67x73” and “pixel 67x74”, that even the slightest shift in cable or connector impedance can fling your cursor halfway into the next danged ZIP-code, regardless of where you touched the screen!

When this form of “M.D.S.” rears its ugly little head, no amount of “Digi”-correcting software can compensate for the “madness”, since it is NOT triggered by powering-off/on the device but, instead, is entirely dependent upon temperature, humidity, atmospheric pressure, vibration, movement, flexing of the device’s frame, opening and closing the slide and, for that matter, the cross-gravimetric effects of sun, moon and flippin’ planets!

In other words, Chaos Theory! The aggregate cursor drift is almost completely unpredictable, frequently from one millisecond to the next! (If someone in Osaka, Japan plays an mpeg on their PDA of a butterfly flapping its wings…?)

So far (knock on wood!), a certain “outpatient surgical procedure” I’ve developed has completely “cured” all four of my “guinea pig” Tungsten Ts of their mechanical “madness”. However, as I’m still debating whether to simply upload the photos and instructions or to try offering it as a paid service somewhere, I’ll not reveal it here, just yet.

Happy “merciless editing”, all!

The Doctor Is On 00:49, 3 August 2007 (UTC)