Automated Doors and Stuff

I'm sure we've all had isues with automatic doors or paper towel dispensers or faucets not working optimally. Doors seem to have improves a lot in the last few years - the used to be either too slow at opening or so sensitive that they open when you're just walking by 20 feet away. Paper towel dispensers have worked well for awhile - you just have to know where to wave your hand and accept that the paper towels come at a fixed size. It is very annoying to me when I see someone try to pull the paper while the machine is dispensing it. That's how the machines get screwd up or how they get mis-calibrated and later on give out inappropriately-sized paper towels.

 

Automatic sinks still have significant improvements that need to be made. Maybe they are harder because the background to the next object is so close - only a foot or so from the sensor to the sink wall and therefore it may be harder to judge whether someone's hands are there. You wet your hands, then you reach for soap and the water turns off, you pull your hands back an inch or two and the water turns off, you try to wash your face and the water turns off. Additionally, it is hard to find how to control the water temperature, if that's even a feature of most automatic faucets. I think I would like a job designing automated things. What companies do such engineering?

 

Today I found an automated toilet that really got on my nerves. I was stuck on the toilet longer than I 'd like to be and 3 times the toilet flushed automatically and I jumped up each time to keep from getting my whole butt wet. It got to the point where I was jumping up even when I heard a neighboring toilet flush. It was totally not good at predicting when I was done. A slight movement forward or re-adjustment triggered a flush. I don't even think automating toilet flushing is a very useful thing. I mean, we are all washing our hands afterward so it's not saving on getting out hands dirty by touching things, which I consider to be one of the main benefits of automatic doors and paper towel dispensers. Next time I'll wait for the handicapped spot, like I usually do, which does not have the automatic flush feature.