While you do not need software devs for a button, once you have enough buttons doing enough things controlling them with a computer becomes much easier than controlling them using mechanical analog circuitry. This is the whole reason for SBCs like the Arduino, so people can make the transitionary step between “my project is simple enough to have physical logic built into it” and “my project is so complex it no longer makes sense for me to hand build the logic”
If you haven’t messed with physical logic gates before, I recommend it! If you don’t have a physical workspace to do it in, Minecraft actually Makes a ‘great’ sandbox for playing with logic circuits. Superflat Creative worlds are the bomb for that.
Start with a simple yes gate, then learn a not gate, then an And, then an Or, and build up from there!
You’ll find very quickly that once you need persistence involved, projects with physical logic can scale massively with each additional bit of storage added. Doing something with that storage? Good luck! As a result, nowadays we pay someone for a tiny computer they already made, and program it to make our buttons do stuff, instead of just having the buttons do stuff directly.
some_kind_of_guy@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
You need someone to figure out how to get the car to interpret that button press. Whether it’s an electrical engineer or a dev doesn’t make too much difference to the argument.
the software route actually makes a bit more sense at scale, as you can abstract all the same functions into the car’s computer regardless of what human interface device is activating that function.