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

971–980 of 1001 posts

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

#971

Post by blobbers »

bigyikes wrote: post #335
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…

I’ll bite, how do you make a self-driving submarine? There’s no GPS under the ocean? I imagine you’d need some kind of sea floor SLAM which sounds… really hard?

You know, once you challenged me on this I thought about a bit more and it seems its actually probably pretty hard short of using sonar off the sea floor.

If you use inertial sensors, you're in a moving fluid which really messes up your ability to dead set navigate.

That said, it seems like it would be much easier for a computer to handle this than a person, especially if it had already mapped the area.

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

#972

Post by sundvor »

adql wrote: post #874
sundvor wrote: post #719

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you were to believed the movies, the Thrustmaster Warthog HOTAS Flight Stick is the most common input method on any flying vehicle. :)

It is a good stick tho

It is indeed :) I upgraded mine to the VKB Gunfighter Ultimate, as it allows for much less stress on your arm and fingers, but kept the Throttle.

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

#973

Post by top_sigrid »

wingworks wrote: post #336
sho_hn wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The German publication Der Spiegel has an interview up with a tourist who visited the Titanic on the same vessel.

https://www.spiegel.de/panorama/titan-tauchgang-zum-wrack-de... Edit, oh, it's a pay walled story.

https://archive.ph/iBnRE

There you go :-)

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

#974

Post by dharmab »

somerandomqaguy wrote: post #643
dharmab wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet, the Logitech X56 is substantially more expensive than a VKB Gladiator...

The X56 can't be compared to the VKB Gladiator. The X56 is full HOTAS with split throttle and an twist axis on the stick itself. The VKB Gladiator needs to purchase an additional module for twist and VKB doesn't even have a split throttle. Also keep in mind that the X56, X52 Pro, and X52 weren't Logitech either. Logitech bought out Saitek which was the original vendor and at least at first glance they haven't updated…

The Gladiator is a twist stick, no extra module required.

I'd rather have the more accurate Gladiator without a throttle over the terribly imprecise X56.

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

#975

Post by [deleted] »

truemotive wrote: post #702
heavyset_go wrote: post #699

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…

Both of these videos went private apparently, I'd really like to see this doc.

[deleted]

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

#976

Post by [deleted] »

major4x wrote: post #703
heavyset_go wrote: post #699

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…

It says "private video".

[deleted]

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

#977

Post by [deleted] »

heavyset_go wrote: post #725
truemotive wrote: post #681

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm really frustrated by anyone that poo-poos this specific issue. One shall absolutely fucking obsess, me for instance about the game controller they used. Look at this. https://i.imgur.com/FrdR7TP.png So the F710 Logitech gamepad was something I wouldn't even trust as a teenager to let me play emulated retro games accurately. It has a hardware switch to toggle between DirectInput (an ancient input technology within…

. Edit: The bit mentioned above is at 0:37 in this video: https://youtu.be/ClkytJa0ghc?t=37 - "we keep a couple of spares on board just in case", that's great but I'm wondering who in that sub knows how to pair an ancient Logitech gamepad and remap XInput like a kid playing Diablo. They don't, in the BBC Travel episode "Take Me to Titanic" about this team and their sub, they did a dive with customers and almost had t…

[deleted]

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

#978

Post by rldjbpin »

as an avid controller user, i wonder if they keep spare controllers at hand for mission-critical scenarios. given how little waranty first-party controller makers provide (3 months for xbox), and how almost all of them use potentiometers for joysticks, which are prone to "stick drift", i wonder how many situations could have a loss of accurate control because of this.

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

#979

Post by sumo89 »

IshKebab wrote: post #947
_ea1k wrote: post #896

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

wifi dongles aren't exactly bullet proof. For example if you use a cycling turbo trainer with a power meter, a macbook and an ANT+ (2.4ghz) dongle there's a good chance you've had to buy a 6 foot extender cable so get the dongle far enough away from the macbook because something about the macbook itself interferes with the signal. It's a known thing among home training cyclists.

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

#980

Post by brutusborn »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #744
brutusborn wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is scale and ability to measure risk. We know how to make chicken safe and a lot of people eat it, so regulation works well. For subs, it is a tiny number of people and risks are nearly impossible to assess.

> risks are nearly impossible to assess this is total fabrication, we have submarines for 200 years. WW1 german u-boats were safer than this piece of crap

We’ve had subs, but not mini subs that go to 4km depths.
Post reply on HN