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That’s not new idea US Navy is using Xbox 360 Controller in USS Colorado submarine - https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/18/17136808/us-navy-uss-colorado-xbox-controller
The US Navy uses Xbox controllers for control of the periscope only, not driving the submarine around.
That was for efficiency on getting periscope qualified, most recruits already have familiarity with game controllers and it reduces training time since things like zooming with triggers just comes naturally due to the standardization of such things in gaming.
They’re wired though, and it’s just an input for the periscope system which is otherwise running the same hardware.
And to operate submarines, and to fly drones, and (in Israel) to drive tanks, etc. When they created the grenade they made it as similar to a baseball as possible so young recruits at the time would already know how to throw them. Similar idea to the controller, lots of young recruits will already have hundreds or thousands of hours of time logged on them, so it minimizes training time.
This was how I knew that the Xbox Series X/S would have backwards compatible controllers. Microsoft has too much government money riding on the previous Xbox controllers for them to change it.
After seeing pics of the submarine, it seems like the Logitech controller is actually the least sketchy part.
Can you link to some pics?
Here’s a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29co_Hksk6o
I agree with the other commenter—pretty sketchy all around.
Here is a submariners take on the accident with the information available so far:
I didn’t expect to watch that whole thing, but I did. What an absolute gong show. How these people got conned into getting into that death trap is beyond me.
I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with that.
Increasing the marginal cost would let you spend more on materials or something, but gamepads are pretty darn reliable. It’s not like plastic needs to be replaced with metal or something. Though…you could maybe make an argument for Hall effect analog sticks rather than potentiometer-based analog sticks to avoid that damned analog drift. But in general, I don’t think that there’d be any drastic improvement you could get by having a controller that has a higher marginal cost.
Logitech sells a ton of gamepads. That means that the fixed costs, the costs that the manufacturer has to spend on regardless of how many units they make, are spread over many units – every customer who buys a gamepad pays just a little bit towards that. So it’s not like they have to skimp on R&D – they just spread it over a lot of units.
If you went out and engineered some sort of custom “sub gamepad”, you could spend $1M and make a single custom gamepad for that sub. Maybe it’d have the sub’s logo on it or something, but it probably wouldn’t buy much. And it’d probably have less R&D spending on that gamepad, which represents time spent debugging and testing it, than would the Logitech one.
Yea nothing new. The technology in these things is decades old, fully perfected and unless you’re using some Nintendo parts, bullet-proof. There isn’t much anyone can do to improve on proven game controller technology without exorbitant costs. Heck, in a sub you probably won’t throw the pad against the wall, so it should last centuries.
“OH NO! Does anyone have any AA batteries on them?”
I mean, unless that controller is what caused this incident I don’t see how that’s anything other than a cheap shot at the company behind this debacle. Not that they and their submarine aren’t sketchy for plenty of other reasons, but “they used common off-the-shelf tech for part of their thing!” shouldn’t alarm anyone. It’s such common practice across the scientific, military, and tech communities to use commercial off-the-shelf solutions when it makes sense to do so, because why would you reinvent something like the computer mouse if you don’t have to?
ok so company used well tested and quality assured solution rather than engineering their own solution that would be untested and hard to maintain. Sounds like they made the right choice. Electric steering solutions are not complex.
