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this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
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The owner is on record saying he thinks safety regulations are bogus an he's actively looked to cutting corners because you can't live in safety our whole life.
This whole thing was a stupid mess. I can't even really muster any sympathy for this situation because everyone made boneheaded decisions every step of the process. Including controlling thrust and control surfaces with a wireless PC controller because you're too much of a spedthrift to spend 10k on some deep sea cable glands and build an actual fly by wire system for your 1.25 million dollar trips to the bottom of the oceans.
Wait whaaaaaaat? They seriously used wireless PC controller for thrust and control surfaces?
Oh my god. If that's true that might be the most brain dead thing I've ever read today. Can you please give me a source, I have to know more about this now. :0
Edit: holy shit. I'm watching SomeOrdinaryGamers' video.
I can't speak to the sub, but many Navy ships were retrofitted with systems to be controlled by XBox 360 controllers. Turns out training new people on the controller had huge improvements over the old systems.
EOD also has robots controlled by a "game controller". So do many drones.
This isn't a "crazy" thing to do. (except if it's wireless. Keep that cable)
https://thegamingwatcher.com/pages/articles/best-xbox/2023/6/21/gamepads-military-xbox-controllers-gaming
You're right if it would have been an xbox controller, it wouldn't have been crazy.
It was actually a basically ancient Logitech Controller, which had connection problems even when you use it inside your home in front of your pc.
I guess they can be pretty safe from radio interference there, at least :).
I doubt the connectivity issues need to exist, though, probably works just fine in some configurations. What I'm wondering though if they had a spare, and maybe a second spare, and space batteries, on the boat. Or possibly manual override (doesn't sound like it).
I think the device itself is fine, though it might be indicative of too aggressive cost cutting measures.
An article on APNews said there were multiple backups onboard... Which sort of engenders the thought of why they needed multiple backups. I'd be sure to have A backup, sure, but multiple?
My thought is are they from different lots and are the batteries from different manufacturers and different lots? You don't want to have 5 devices and them all from the same batch and all fail in the same way. A company not concerned by safety probably wouldn't consider any of this. I also bet their SOP didn't include changing batteries every time, so you have to rule out that these spares probably weren't getting charged up or have their batteries replaced either.
Yeah I absolutely understand that. But that wireless part id what gets me man. Why add so many points of failure? I'm just so mind blown that they were okay with using such off the shelf components.
I've watched the Deep sea challenge documentary maybe 6-7 years ago.. and IIRC everything on that sub had to be rigorously tested and custom made. They made sure that the sub was prepared for the worst. They reduced the no of failure points as much as they could. "Always assume anything or everything that can go wrong, will go wrong" was kind of their philosophy.
So I always assumed that, every other sub and expedition will be treated the same. It's like sending astronauts to the moon.