Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

691–700 of 1001 posts

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

#691

Post by Robin_Message »

venusenvy47 wrote: post #379
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…

I'm also annoyed at the company for all the public emergency resources being forced to help rescue this contraption.

I thought about this, and came to the conclusion that the coastguard and especially military see it as a good opportunity to test their equipment and procedures for real.

And seafarers have a strong code of ethics about helping other seafarers.

As long as they aren't brown.

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

#692

Post by ikrenji »

major4x wrote: post #666

One shall not obsess with the game controller they use, I suppose, in their analysis, failing the controller wouldn't prevent the sub from resurfacing... It is symptomatic, however. The whole Silicon Valley is like that. You have the old guard, NASA, millions for fault analysis, rumors go the C code on some NASA rocket was certified at $1000 per line---human eyeballs reading it... All those start-ups and unicorns, th…

you dont need the same coding standards for a crud web app vs a NASA space probe...

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

#693

Post by typon »

windowshopping wrote: post #402
xwdv wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sea is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. The only thing bigger is space.

Sorry but this doesn't really answer my question. I know the sea is vast. Yet we are able to navigate it consistently. Why is this vessel unable to stay in contact with its parent and relay its relative location?

2D vs 3D navigation is a categorical difference.

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

#694

Post by nocontextpls »

windowshopping wrote: post #644
rgovostes wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

> 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. Sure, but you'd know the last location, wouldn't you? Especially if it's pinging at least once a minute? And if the craft failed, surely they would just set down on the floor nearby, not travel miles in a random direction sideway.

[dead]

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

#695

Post by moi2388 »

ikrenji wrote: post #692
major4x wrote: post #666

One shall not obsess with the game controller they use, I suppose, in their analysis, failing the controller wouldn't prevent the sub from resurfacing... It is symptomatic, however. The whole Silicon Valley is like that. You have the old guard, NASA, millions for fault analysis, rumors go the C code on some NASA rocket was certified at $1000 per line---human eyeballs reading it... All those start-ups and unicorns, th…

you dont need the same coding standards for a crud web app vs a NASA space probe...

[flagged]

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

#696

Post by Ratiofarmings »

tredre3 wrote: post #16
srmarm wrote: post #3

The US Navy uses an Xbox 360 controller in active service [0] Mass market has a lot of R&D to leverage so it makes sense. Nothing to say this is the cause of the fault and probably going to be more reliable than something hand rolled. [0] https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/19/16333376/us-navy-military...

I personally believe using mass market makes sense. I don't understand the criticism I've seen on this website for using off the shelf controllers or camping lights (what do you expect, an LED strip magically engineered by a large aeronautics firm specifically for the sub? and what would that change?). That being said, the difference between a Microsoft controller and a third party is that Microsoft very certainly di…

Also assuming that weight isn't an issue, the controller being $30 makes redundancy easy. Just like every other kid playing video games, simply have a second one in case the first one fails.

It's small, cheap and replaced in seconds.

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

#697

Post by major4x »

dehrmann wrote: post #688
major4x wrote: post #666

One shall not obsess with the game controller they use, I suppose, in their analysis, failing the controller wouldn't prevent the sub from resurfacing... It is symptomatic, however. The whole Silicon Valley is like that. You have the old guard, NASA, millions for fault analysis, rumors go the C code on some NASA rocket was certified at $1000 per line---human eyeballs reading it... All those start-ups and unicorns, th…

For the most part (so no self-driving cars), startups are in a low-stakes game, so it makes sense to hack away, and it nas nothing to do with an "old guard." Google (or any other tech company) outages aren't particularly memorable unless you were an engineer involved in it. The space shuttle accidents were labeled "disasters."

Theranos? All those cases of neglected security when data leaked and/or people killed themselves over scams?

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

#698

Post by rich_sasha »

javajosh wrote: post #356
proggy wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is simply unbelievable that the company was even able to get to the point of diving to such depths with humans aboard. If they had encountered a program-destroying but non-catastrophic failure earlier on, it is possible we wouldn't be looking at one of the many horrific outcomes that this incident will likely resolve to. Looking at the accounts reported to date, the OceanGate engineering culture was basically non-…

>It is simply unbelievable that the company was even able to get to the point of diving to such depths with humans aboard. As I get older, I see this sentiment as very naive. The tacit assumption seems to be that there is an agency, a government, an organization, that would review and approve such endeavors. But that's just not how the world works. You can't stop people from going to sea, or sending contraptions to t…

You can't stop this and likely shouldn't as you say, but still, this anecdote, if true, means:

- they didn't do a test dive first with no humans on board

- they didn't do a test dive with just staff, no paying customers

- the first "test" was to the full depth where the craft would be basically unrecoverable

- they didn't seem to even test these things ashore... Because you'd find out if the damn motor was on backwards!

If true, this strikes me as beyond amateurish and outright insane.

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

#699

Post by heavyset_go »

There was a BBC special on this submarine, and it features that $30 Logitech gamepad extensively.

At one point they were at the bottom of the sea and the gamepad just stops working, as in the mapping of the gamepad keys to the controls of the sub weren't working correctly. They were stuck spinning around in circles on the sea floor.

The owner, on a boat in the middle of the ocean, had to call whoever it was that set up the gamepad for him on a cell phone, while his team and customers were at the bottom of the ocean, to figure out how the gamepad worked. That person never answered. They eventually troubleshoot it and find out that 'left' on the gamepad was actually forward in real life and all of the keys were mapped incorrectly.

The software that they depended on was just as buggy as you'd expect, and having watched the BBC special, I would never get in any submersible that this team designed or touched.

BBC Special Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLI9SpUDdwo

BBC Special Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLOhOAJV5II

edit: apparently they were made private. You can find the show here on BBC Travel's website, they're the "Take Me to Titanic" episodes:

Part 1: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001d2ml

Part 2: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001d7b6

Some other horrors from the episodes if you can't access them:

- They didn't have navigation systems on the sub, so they were basically dead reckoning and trying to confirm their location with their team at the ocean's surface.

- They lost control multiple times.

- There were multiple incidents where they almost aborted the trip 16+ hours into it.

- It looked like they didn't even have voice or video communication with their team at the surface, they were communicating using text on what looked like an 1990's AIM client.

- It looked like everything was rigged together with consumer hardware, using older versions of Windows and custom software.

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

#700

Post by saberience »

babypuncher wrote: post #241
srmarm wrote: post #3

The US Navy uses an Xbox 360 controller in active service [0] Mass market has a lot of R&D to leverage so it makes sense. Nothing to say this is the cause of the fault and probably going to be more reliable than something hand rolled. [0] https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/19/16333376/us-navy-military...

I doubt anyone thinks this is why the sub went missing. It's just funny that the submarine, which went missing, and is now notorious for skimping on safety, went with a generic "third party" controller instead of something higher quality, like a genuine Xbox controller from Microsoft.

You think it’s funny that these people are most likely dying or dead right now?
Post reply on HN