Feature Request: "Pessimistic TC" Mode (Wattage Range with Fallback Recovery)

[Jalcide]

It could be called something like "Pessimistic Mode," "Hybrid Mode," "Legacy Atomizer mode," "Wattage Fallback Mode," or, "Imperfect / Cheap Atomizer Mode," etc.

Actually, maybe "Wattage Protection" is what it really is.

Nutshell: It would lock to a user-set mean-wattage and only use TC for gentle steering. It would not go above or below a user-set min/max value.

It would have a recovery feature that would recalibrate itself based on the assumption something less-than-ideal happened to the connectivity.

Maybe someday TC will eventually compel atomizer designers to make attys that work flawlessly with TC; first time, every time, all other things being equal; Ultra Quality Control and designs to ensure 510 pins don't lose connectivity, push the 510 down too far, or not far enough, gold or silver plating in all the right spots, material choices throughout, screws and solder points, etc.

Since that day has not arrived, we all have a lot of atty and wire combos that work well with TC, for a while, and then go haywire mid-tank.

Vape gets too hot, or weak when: Juice gets lower, or is topped off; atty sits for a while, is moved to a different room or is chain vaped; airflow adjustment bumps atty connection a nanometer; heat expansion and contraction moves a less than ideal 510 pin a micrometer looser, etc.

Rather than having this thread devolve into another "tips and tricks" digest about how to clean contacts, use ideal atomizers with near perfect stability, etc. I'd like to propose a possible solution, a feature, that would solve about 95% of real-world issues with the current generation of less-than-perfect atomizers.

In almost all these "what just happened?!" situations a brute force fix, at least in my experience, is to simply turn off TC and set the wattage where I know it should be. In fact, I've never had this not work.

Whatever connectivity contact points or thermodynamic states went pear-shaped, it didn't go so badly that pushing a last-known-good wattage at the coil wouldn't return an acceptable vape.

So, here's how the automated version might work:

Three settings for the mode. The user would set a mean-wattage to a value known to give the best overall vape for the build, a max wattage upper range limit and a min wattage limit. Maybe those value would be expressed as a wattage delta (up and down) from the mean-wattage the user set.

It would not be about dry-hit protection. The user would be responsible for keeping juice in the tank, while in this mode.

The chip would only use TC to "steer" within the range and would smooth out the vape more than other modes do.

If the TC calculation wanted to hit a wattage lower or higher than the min/max wattage range limits, it wouldn't.

When the chip encounters this "failure" -- that it gracefully issues the fallback wattage for -- more than three times, it assumes something has changed with the state of the build and recalibrates based on the assumption that the fallback wattage the user set is still delivering a good vape.

Basically, it locks to the wattage, first, and shifts its understanding of the the universe around it.

The chip knows a heck of a lot. I'm sure something more intelligent than: "Oh, you've been vaping at around 20 mean-watts for 10 minutes and seem to be happy, but guess what, something changed somewhere by .00000002, so I guess you must want a 130 watt vape now (or a 2 watt vape). Here you go...!" 

No, no I do not. I want around 20 mean-watts, until I say otherwise. You figure it out, DNA chip.