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Submarine missing near Titanic used a $30 Logitech gamepad for steering

arstechnica.com

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Re: Submarine missing near Titanic used a $30 Logitech gamepad for steering

#551

Post by rgovostes »

windowshopping wrote: post #390

Can anyone who knows something about this industry answer a question? I know nothing about it and I was surprised to read about this situation because I would have assumed a submersible would be in fairly constant sonar contact with its surface vessel. I would've thought it would be followed a rigidly planned route and its location relative to the surface ship would be well understood at all times, i.e. "you are 3508…

Think about all the methods used throughout human history to determine location. Looking toward distant mountain ranges, determining the positions of the stars, measuring shadows cast by the sun, receiving signals from GPS satellites... none of those work underwater.

The support vessel relies on acoustic pings to track the submersible. If the submersible stops responding, or is out of detection range, you'd have no idea where it is.

"Rigidly planned route" is not really the case either. You're not going to drop in at the exact same GPS coordinate, and there might be currents that push you.

Re: Submarine missing near Titanic used a $30 Logitech gamepad for steering

#552

Post by thehappypm »

Karupan wrote: post #165

According to the NYTimes, OceanGate refused to undergo any sort of external audit/certification process [0]. I would imagine using an off the shelf, cheap controller would have been one of the first things to be flagged. Makes you wonder how many other critical components did they skimp on [0] https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/06/20/us/titanic-missing-s...

Why would off the shelf be considered a bad thing?

If you’re an engineer, finding a reliable part from a supplier that meets your spec is an amazing thing.

Intel processors are off the shelf, as are 555 timers, screws, literally everything.

Not every field is like computer science where “isEven” has a library that makes sense to avoid

Re: Submarine missing near Titanic used a $30 Logitech gamepad for steering

#553

Post by accrual »

jojobas wrote: post #310
blobbers wrote: post #309

This is a shockingly simple product to make "self driving". Why on earth do they have any controller, aside from some sort of emergency up button. Furthermore, what the hell is the emergency plan??? This is going to cost taxpayers millions of dollars. The CEO who should be held criminally liable is inside the sub. I really, really hope they're found alive so that he can be held to account for this. With regard to the…

>The CEO who should be held criminally liable is inside the sub. The ultimate indemnity.

Presumably the company could at least still be sued and have all assets liquidated. Perhaps some others will still be found liable.

Re: Submarine missing near Titanic used a $30 Logitech gamepad for steering

#554

Post by dmonitor »

ethbr0 wrote: post #411
dmonitor wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's an awful lot of keyboard engineering, given nobody knows what happened yet. Unless I'm mistaken, the subject article starts with the words "Submarine missing". The fact that the whole thing was jury rigged and double checked by nobody with certifications is enough to start pointing fingers at the engineers. This isn't the company's first trip either. They've taken multiple trips down and have almost lost the…

Yes. "Missing" Assuming it sunk, it'll be order of week before it's found. It'll be order of month before it's raised, if it can be. And then after analysis we might know why it sunk. +60 hours after lost contact, while there are possibly still people alive inside the vehicle, seems premature and crass to be casting accusations for internet points.

The fact that they can’t even find it is in part because they didn’t outfit it with any capability to send a distress signal. They lost it multiple times but never added a radio beacon or anything.

Re: Submarine missing near Titanic used a $30 Logitech gamepad for steering

#555

Post by cachvico »

greiskul wrote: post #531
nonethewiser wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just imagining it running out of batteries. Then the user non-chalantly asks the pilot/guide for the spares. But they get a blank look. They repeat themselves. They must not have heard. They get a grimace this time and they suddenly realize what a precarious situation they were in all along.

They had spare controllers. Part of the idea of using off the shelf components like this, is the ease of replacement. If you have a 100k controller, and it fails, you need to think how to fix it. If your controller costs 30 bucks, throw it away and change for a new one.

Do you _know_ they had spare controllers?

Re: Submarine missing near Titanic used a $30 Logitech gamepad for steering

#556

Post by LeoPanthera »

sixQuarks wrote: post #375
LeoPanthera wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I own a Tesla, and I can tell you that the aesthetics are only aesthetics. The beauty is literally skin-deep. Inside, the car is bodged together to make manufacturing as cheap as possible and with no other considerations. Tesla likes to boast about the safety of their cars, and while I don't deny this, I believe that the safety is an accidental side-effect of the inherent properties of building a car with no explosiv…

If safety is an accidental side effect, then why are no other electric vehicles ranked as high in safety?

Where did you read that?

Many other EVs have equivalent safety ratings.

https://www.euroncap.com/en/ratings-rewards/electric-vehicle...

https://www.shift2electric.com/_files/ugd/49f443_f12301e882e...

Re: Submarine missing near Titanic used a $30 Logitech gamepad for steering

#557

Post by kossTKR »

The most bizarre thing in this thread is the people defending the cheap shit controller with lots of bad reviews on Amazon.

Some devs are so cheap it's grotesque bordering on delusional. Just splurge on the controller that's 100$ dollar more or maybe buy the lamp that's not from alibabas camping section, i promise you that's not what is going to tilt the budgets.

The xbox controller is already used by the military and other industrial environments exactly because of reliability - if you can't research your way to that info from just googling and instead want to "stock up on probably good-enough controllers, or have an extra one lying around (because there's lots of space in a sub??)" or "just be economical" or "i used the controller and it was good" - i'm happy you are not working with any software i would ever use, and for gods sake never anything mission critical.

Imagine being able to 100x the reliability of large parts of the one and only prototype you have, but instead you save 300 dollars of your 50 million dollar budget.

Re: Submarine missing near Titanic used a $30 Logitech gamepad for steering

#558

Post by wespiser_2018 »

Aeolun wrote: post #370
hunson_abadeer wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe so, but it's easy to say this after the fact. When kludges like this work, we admire "scrappy" and "ingenious" engineers who are finding ways to launch rockets or build submarines or medical devices or whatever for fraction the price. It's only when it blows up that it turns from "ingenuity" into "amateur hour". People who participated in this knew the risks. They fucked up. None of us would have designed a bet…

> None of us would have designed a better submarine I dunno. I would never go with wireless over cabled, certainly not as my primary steering method, and it sure as hell wouldn’t be the only method onboard to control the thing. Maybe it’s better if these things are build by paranoid instead of adventurous people?

It's pretty easy, just hire one subject matter expert (SME) on submarines and listen to them.

So many problems with this scheme, though. No rigorous test (depth, survival, atmosphere), lack of SMEs, carbon fiber hull, failed to learn lessons from aviation (don't lock people in a room that can burn), lack of ventilation, failure to provide emergency breathing, no voice comms, and finally the comms loss during testing that was normalized as operating procedure.

All you'd have to do is not make one of those mistakes, and you'd be doing a better job. These are all issues that are solved on US Navy subs, where we train hundreds of people every year to work on and retire just as many. You don't need to know all these systems, though, just find a retired sub chief and have them walk you through the safety systems.

One thing I've picked up working in software, is that you can enter new domains with relative ease if you just align yourself with experts, and at least listen to their advice. This isn't something that happened on the sub, and I'd be surprised if it ultimately didn't contribute to the total vehicle loss.

Re: Submarine missing near Titanic used a $30 Logitech gamepad for steering

#559

Post by bobmaxup »

vel0city wrote: post #217
vlod wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See my previous comment [0]: "that would release some sort of buoy, that would float to the surface and start transmitting with gps etc." That should work if it's floating I would think? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36409802

I wonder what the drift would be like if you released a buoy 2 miles below the surface. You could theoretically have the last estimated location of the sub, but even then that's largely an estimate as its not like the sub actually has a GPS fix its all dead reckoning. They already know about where the sub should be, somewhere around the Titanic wreck. If an untethered buoy pops up a few miles away, does it really do…

https://dosits.org/people-and-sound/communication/how-is-sou...

https://dosits.org/galleries/technology-gallery/navigation-t...

Re: Submarine missing near Titanic used a $30 Logitech gamepad for steering

#560

Post by wespiser_2018 »

ghostpepper wrote: post #461
mcpherrinm wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are latching onto the logitech controller, but I think it's low on my concerns list. Controllers are relatively robust, and they stated they had backups, and could surface without any control input by manually dumping the ballast. Much more concerning are the potential flaws in the carbon fiber hull, as disclosed during the David Lochridge lawsuit (mentioned in another thread), the rumoured lack of surface rad…

Just to nit pick, what good is an exit going to do at 12,000 feet?

When you have a fire and need to surface, it's going to do a lot of good. One of the Apollo crews burned alive because the ground crew couldn't unscrew the hatch fast enough during a pre-flight checkout. One of those astronauts, Gus Grisham, nearly died a previous time when the explosive bolts on another capsule fired early which caused the capsule to take on water.

The problems here are just several fold: maybe the door won't help you at depth, but there's a pretty wide envelope of conditions in which a fast escape hatch is the difference between surviving a fire and burning alive.

The CEO of OceanGate said he "learned the lessons of aviation", but this is obviously BS if he's locking himself in a capsule with flammable equipment, piping oxygen in, and just hoping it doesn't burn. That's a recipe for disaster we know how to avoid.

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