Few years old: Navy Submarine using xbox controller.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/18/17136808/us-navy-uss-colo...
Submarine missing near Titanic used a $30 Logitech gamepad for steering
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Re: Submarine missing near Titanic used a $30 Logitech gamepad for steering
#942Earlier 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 they have spare batteries? Have the batteries been stored in an environment where they won't degrade? Are they rechargeable? If so, has their state of charge been confirmed before sailing, etc., etc., etc.
COTS stuff is awesome, but it doesn't absolve you from having proper procedures in place and knowing what those procedures should be in the first place.
Re: Submarine missing near Titanic used a $30 Logitech gamepad for steering
#943Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm also annoyed at the company for all the public emergency resources being forced to help rescue this contraption.
Whilst I agree, and I hope the vessel had adequate insurance for such an eventuality, it's a excellent "training" exercise. Real world scenarios which don't involve any enemy combatants are invaluable to keep everyone at peak readiness
It's also a little annoying to hear their lead adviser, David Concannon, complain about government moving too slowly:
https://youtu.be/nW3r01_ZWmY
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/oceangate-...
He's representing a company that took safety shortcuts because government regulations slow innovation, but is also complaining that the government isn't helping them quickly enough in this search.
He thanks the governments, but says they need to move faster. As an adviser, he should be telling this company to have a better emergency plan.
Re: Submarine missing near Titanic used a $30 Logitech gamepad for steering
#944Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, 100% agree. What I find unbelievable is how many people casually throw around the idea of approval process to prevent bad thing X that just happened, that few even knew existed. We have laborious and very expensive approval processes for airplanes, ask the 737 MAX inspector from the FAA how well that guarded against bad engineering. If even the bad engineering is at fault here (unknown as of writing this).
>We have laborious and very expensive approval processes for airplanes, ask the 737 MAX inspector from the FAA how well that guarded against bad engineering. Those approval processes don't work when the government regulators allow the company being regulated to "self-regulate". There was no real FAA approval process for the 737MAX: FAA just let Boeing do it themselves. Of course that's going to lead to bad engineerin…
that’s my point; approval processes are always gamed around because of the cost such processes impose. You can’t just say oh the rules ought to be perfect and perfectly implemented for it to work. That’s not a world in which we live in. In fact, the more thorough the process, the more to gain in working around it.
In the meantime such processes add much to the expense such that only larger well-funded and well-connected people can participate. The ones most likely to game it, btw.
It’s a reason planes basically look the same for many decades too; newer stuff is harder to get through. Also part of why Boeing thought it best to revise an existing design once more, besides designing a new one. The process led to bad design decisions quite directly, though of course everyone blames Boeing (rightly) but not the process the FAA imposed.
Re: Submarine missing near Titanic used a $30 Logitech gamepad for steering
#945Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Nothing is untestable. If validation results in destruction, then destructive testing is how this is done. Failing to test is a choice, similar to the choice made by a software engineer who determines, without testing, that their production service has no bugs. If a component's flaw can only be detected right before a failure, we need statistical analysis of multiple such failures being intentionally induced to estim…
THIS.
As a Quality Assurance person, this is what drives me up the wall, across the ceiling, and down the other wall.
You can always do a test run. Not doing that test run is essentially saying every person you subject to that system is not worth the trouble of doing the test.
Re: Submarine missing near Titanic used a $30 Logitech gamepad for steering
#946Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The critical components like the capsule were designed alongside NASA I saw that claim, and wondered what it entailed. The founder is clearly in the mold of testing mission-critical/life or death systems in production, while skirting or floating the rules. Such a claim is like one of those logos you see on the front of software start ups home pages, claiming some usage by Google, MIT, or CERN, without any verificatio…
You mean this NASA....
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/apollo/missions/apollo1.h...
https://history.nasa.gov/Apollo204/invest.html
Where a small fire in a controlled environment killed people in 30 seconds?
or this, where they didn't listen to the engineer?
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/01/28/464744781...
NASA isn't a magical place where they don't mess things up
Re: Submarine missing near Titanic used a $30 Logitech gamepad for steering
#947Earlier quoted context omitted.
Trusting your life to Bluetooth on Linux. Ouch.
Yeah, I had the same thought. I really hope they had more of a safety plan than that.
It turns out it wasn't Bluetooth - it was one of those proprietary radios with a USB dongle which should be a lot more reliable. But still... it doesn't sound like they had any kind of backup at all. Maybe they just didn't talk about the backups?
Re: Submarine missing near Titanic used a $30 Logitech gamepad for steering
#948Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
I’ve know mountain climbers, hang glider/paraglider pilots, scuba divers, sky divers, and more and we pretty much say that exact thing. I’ve been casual acquaintances with people who have died doing extreme sports. Usually, the people in these sports say if the worst were to happen to them, they accept that risk and wouldn’t want their fate to stop other people from following their passions. That the feeling of being…
...Yes, you're going to take risks. Got it. This risk in particular ends up with you as chunky salsa 4 kilometers under the water, because you couldn't be bothered to sink a copy of the bloody thing with no one in it first.
If it's worth making, make 2 or 3 of with at least one slated for being destroyed at one point.
Space Shuttle Enterprise never saw Space or the launch pad. It was still made and flown.
Re: Submarine missing near Titanic used a $30 Logitech gamepad for steering
#949Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's one thing for them to take the risk for themselves, but it's a whole other level selling to others. For example, if someone wants to drink a refreshing glass of strychnine soda, it's hard to stop them. But opening a stand and selling at the street corner is a bit different.
the CEO is drinking one with them
Indeed. He put his life on the line. I don't know the circumstance that lead to this and I hope everyone gets rescued, though it's looking quite desperate. But, yeah, that's pretty convincing from a marketing point of view.
Re: Submarine missing near Titanic used a $30 Logitech gamepad for steering
#950One 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 have the old guard, NASA I thought the latest round of NASA missions were using commodity hardware and taking the fail-early-fail-often approach (at least compared to the old days)? And in doing so have delivered, all failures included, the most bang per buck of any NASA missions? Not saying I'd trust my life to a gamepad alone, but pragmatism is a virtue in engineering.
Not quite. They're experimenting with commodity hardware to provide additional experimental functionality on missions, not to replace the core mission hardware.
For instance the mars helicopter, Ingenuity, was effectively an expendable part of the Perseverance rover mission. Even if it never took off they'd still consider the overall mission a success. That it has worked so well despite using commodity hardware has been a nice surprise and might result in NASA using more of it, but the Perseverance rover still used proper rad-hardened chips and other specialised spacecraft components.
They're also definitely not using commodity hardware and fail-fast-fail-often on crewed aircraft.