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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

#821

Post by wnkrshm »

spacephysics wrote: post #810
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…

To further your point, I hope with venture capital funding being far more expensive due to interest rate rise, that these kinds of practices are held back a bit due to money being harder to come by. Or because investor X wants real assurances that something like the current situation doesn’t occur. I think a good example of a balanced company in this space, is SpaceX. They’ve significantly reduced the cost of launchi…

They did the automated dive test, then kept diving without any idea how long the hull will last. They didn't automatically dive until failure.

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

#822

Post by jonathanstrange »

gambiting wrote: post #820
jonathanstrange wrote: post #815

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not true, the maker of this sub compromised substantially on safety and did not have it certified by an independent body like most other builders of deep sea submarines do. In fact, members of the small deep sea submarine community wrote a letter to the company warning them about the safety hazards and the lack of certification. Source: Today's interview with a deep sea exploration submarine commander on Germ…

As it's explained in another comment - the CEO wanted it tested but there isn't a facility anywhere on earth equipped to test it. Perhaps the argument then is that part of the company funding should have been building a custom rig designed for testing this highly custom 5 inch thick carbon fibre shell - but it's not like options to test it were available and were ignored.

This is not true either. As the submarine commander interviewed lays out, the testing is done by actual dives, and there is a certification body for it. Almost every other deep sea exploration submarine is certified. However, getting certified is voluntary.

Of course, certifying it just means that independent experts take a look at the design and use sensors during dives. All of these vehicles are experimental. But not even trying is negligent.

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

#823

Post by zombielinux »

ethbr0 wrote: post #51
addaon wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and what would that change? Suitability for purpose. Some obvious ones: Defined and validated environmentals (temperature, voltage, and in this case pressure). Qualified components — capacitors chosen for lifetime rather than shaving a cent, perhaps avoidance of MEMS oscillators with helium sensitivity. Failure analysis. Low and understood probability of fail-unsafe conditions (short circuit), mitigation for those…

Yes, if one had the budget to do all those things, from scratch, better than an existing component manufacturer. Not many companies have NASA levels of "throw money at it until it works, and every part has been signed off on five times." Absent that, I'm having trouble seeing how custom > COTS. In all probability, anything in-house would have been worse and added new failure modes. Better to buy, analyze, and adapt a…

NASA gets all that done on $28Bn/year.

There's a huge list of companies that have that much revenue.

In some cases, it doesn't matter, but we shouldn't use cash as an excuse to cut corners with safety and reliability.

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

#824

Post by me_me_me »

rob74 wrote: post #747
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…

The use of the controller is symptomatic of their attitude, but I agree that it's probably not as relevant as, say, using an untested (and apparently untestable) carbon fiber hull: > Lochridge’s concerns mainly focused on the company’s decision to rely on sensitive acoustic monitoring – cracking or popping sounds made by the hull under pressure – to detect flaws, rather than a scan of the hull. Lochridge said the com…

there was a guy in other post on this story.

He says that testing of the composite materials is really difficult in comparison with metal. As they fail catastrophically without material stress.

Quotes like: "Lochridge’s concerns mainly focused on the company’s decision to rely on sensitive acoustic monitoring – cracking or popping sounds made by the hull under pressure – to detect flaws, rather than a scan of the hull."

are quite chilling in hindsight

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

#825

Post by Eisenstein »

eterevsky wrote: post #785
meigwilym wrote: post #781

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure of your point here. You claim that SpaceX's process was an iterative one which lead to the 'most reliable rocket in history', but state that the process does not matter.

As I see it, there are two approaches: "NASA" approach and "SpaceX" or "Silicon valley" approach. In "NASA" approach you are building the system bottom-up ensuring the reliability on each level. In "SpaceX" approach you build a barely functional system as fast as you can and then iterate to improve reliability (and other characteristics). The top comment in this thread seems to imply that "NASA" approach is inherentl…

> My view is that from the point of view of safety, the approach doesn't really matter and what matters is the results

But you won't know the 'results' until you have a catastrophe and can do a post-mortem and find out where you went wrong. The approach does matter because one approach is 'let's do everything we can to prevent the catastrophe'. I mean, the approach is safety.

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

#826

Post by [deleted] »

hef19898 wrote: post #671
finitemonkey wrote: post #634

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apollo 1 has been too long ago. Collective memory fades. Each generation seems to need its own disasters to keep its safety standards up.

The general public does, for those in the respective fields those safety lessons are ingrained in proper procedures and constititional knowledge. That's why start-ups in those fields are risky, usually their founders have never witnessed said procedures and knowledge at work, never worked under those procedures. Employees, especially early on, tend to be young an inexperienced as well. As a result, those companies ne…

[deleted]

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

#827

Post by mysterydip »

somenameforme wrote: post #774
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…

Like the video [1] mentions, they were only improvising on things (including the controller) that would not pose a safety hazard if they failed. The critical components like the capsule were designed alongside NASA and others. People aren't just tossing safety to the wind, but trying to create a better balance. NASA does spend a extreme amount of money on compliance and safety - yet that doesn't prevent them from doi…

He told CBS News: "You know, there's a limit. At some point safety just is pure waste. I mean if you just want to be safe, don't get out of bed.

Don't get in your car. Don't do anything. At some point, you're going to take some risk, and it really is a risk/reward question. I think I can do this just as safely by breaking the rules."

https://metro.co.uk/2023/06/20/titanic-sub-ceo-was-worried-a...

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

#828

Post by johnwalkr »

thepasswordis wrote: post #270

I am blown away that there is any overlap between HN readers and people getting gotten by this clickbait. The controller is sending control signals to the computer which controls the motors. The controller itself is basically irrelevant . It’s not actually doing the control, the motor controllers are. Using off the shelf stuff like this is also common since it’s extremely well tested and usually very physically robus…

First of all, the controller setup was seen in previous video to fail during testing so it is not in fact robust as a system even though I agree the controller by itself is probably physically robust.

I work in a robotics field and have an academic background in it as well. The controller and the other related information we know (that its input is mapped to keypresses, that in a previous test a controller failed and the only solution was troubleshooting of the controller, that a thruster was installed backwards in a previous test) is absolutely relevant. I will add that you can also see what are basic office monitors and the windows taskbar in the images. Yes, motor controllers are involved somewhere, and I don't know all of the details, but all of this strongly implies to me that a commercial PC is the core system, with this controller connected via some keymapping software, and motor controllers probably connected by usb-serial converters or something similar.

All of that looks like an undergrad project. It's common and acceptable for a student project's first test in a swimming pool. By the time humans are inside and depth is concerned, formal design and validation of something more robust should be seen. You'd want to see something much more robust with redundancies. At a very bare minimum I would expect something like an industrial or marine joystick and industrial or marine display connected to PLC. That's like a few thousand dollars and still really falls short of what I would be comfortable with. But at least it could be rigorously tested and doesn't depend on windows, drivers, keymapping software and who-knows-what in terms of development environment, libraries, compilers etc.

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

#829

Post by aaron695 »

rwmj wrote: post #46

There's a BBC documentary from last year which I just watched: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0fpz9zw and honestly a lot of it seems quite amateur hour. One of the steering motors was fitted backwards. When they discovered this, at the bottom of the ocean and a few hundred feet from Titanic, the solution they used was to hold the gamepad at right angles to compensate. That time they proceeded with the tour and mad…

[dead]

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

#830

Post by [deleted] »

idop wrote: post #71
rwmj wrote: post #46

There's a BBC documentary from last year which I just watched: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0fpz9zw and honestly a lot of it seems quite amateur hour. One of the steering motors was fitted backwards. When they discovered this, at the bottom of the ocean and a few hundred feet from Titanic, the solution they used was to hold the gamepad at right angles to compensate. That time they proceeded with the tour and mad…

So apparently this OceanGate company is a VC-funded startup or some such founded "to make underwater exploration cheaper and accessible to private citizens" (Wikipedia quote). Tells me everything I need to know about how this all came to be.

[deleted]
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