Comment by srmarm
3 years ago
The US Navy uses an Xbox 360 controller in active service [0]
Mass market has a lot of R&D to leverage so it makes sense. Nothing to say this is the cause of the fault and probably going to be more reliable than something hand rolled.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/19/16333376/us-navy-military...
I personally believe using mass market makes sense. I don't understand the criticism I've seen on this website for using off the shelf controllers or camping lights (what do you expect, an LED strip magically engineered by a large aeronautics firm specifically for the sub? and what would that change?).
That being said, the difference between a Microsoft controller and a third party is that Microsoft very certainly did a tons of reliability and durability testing on their controllers (and it shows). You don't get that with a cheap third party. So I can understand to a degree why people are questioning the decision to not pay the extra 20 bucks and get microsoft gear.
There's a middle ground between "hardware store crap" and "custom." The aviation industry has plenty of standard interior lighting and environmental control system that's known not to light people on fire or short out or otherwise fail and kill somebody.
https://www.collinsaerospace.com/what-we-do/industries/busin...
These are still COTS products.
Absolutely. Former avionics company employee here - not only do companies like Collins have COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) products to buy, but they themselves are frequently made of at least some COTS components. So each of those components have been tested and put into production by a company who's laser focused on the safety and reliability of that part.
You only need to spend a little time with a reliability engineer and see some of the calculations they do to start realizing how when even one or two components in a system have little corners cut, how it can drastically impact the overall safety of the system.
With the amount of corners cut on this submarine, I am unfortunately less than surprised at both the failure in the article and the crisis happening to it right now.
I hope all the souls aboard can somehow get home safe, and I hope the people who put them into this seemingly corners-cut vessel do not get to float any more craft, and that they didn't undersell the riskiness of this venture... although I'm unfortunately not optimistic about any of that.
If you were to believed the movies, the Thrustmaster Warthog HOTAS Flight Stick is the most common input method on any flying vehicle. :)
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Apollo 1 has been too long ago. Collective memory fades. Each generation seems to need its own disasters to keep its safety standards up.
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> The aviation industry has plenty of standard interior lighting and environmental control system that's known not to light people on fire or short out or otherwise fail and kill somebody.
I am pretty sure the camper's equipment industry too. I haven't seen many occurence of campers burning out and in most case it was caused by people smoking in their camper or forgetting to turn off gas stove.
> 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 risks, fume-proof and fire-proof PCB materials to protect the sealed environment in case of failure.
Redundancy to handle failures anyway. Multiple independent strings so that single-point failure lead to partial loss of lighting, not all of it.
Load ahedding, eg dropping all but one string at a known voltage above minimum voltage, to save power for other more critical loads during system failure scenarios.
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 as needed.
And if it turns out you don't need to adapt, because failure modes aren't safety-critical or components are viable in the environment, then spend your time on something more useful.
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Logitech has orders of magnitude more experience in manufacturing peripherals than Microsoft. That said, Logitech does make products in a wide price range and the low end isn't competitive with their own high end.
"Low end" and "high end" in the gaming market doesn't necessarily equate to "reliability," however. "Style" and "customizability" are very high on the differentiators between low/high for gaming peripherals, neither of which are necessary on a sub.
The reviews for the controller (mentioned by name in the article, so easy to look up) are generally great (4.2/5 with thousands of reviews), and the 1/2-star reviews are as frequently about ergonomic issues as they are about reliability. Every batch of controllers is going to have some unreliable ones, so the fact that that doesn't stand out as the common complaint dragging the reviews down says something.
A lot of the rest of the choices for the sub sound sus, but not bothering to splurge on a game controller that cycles RGB is not worthy of a headline, IMO.
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> Logitech has orders of magnitude more experience in manufacturing peripherals than Microsoft.
You know that saying that anybody can build a bridge, but it takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands? From what I've seen and heard, Logitech has used their experience to make peripherals that barely last longer than the warranty/return period.
FWIW my 22 year old optical intellimouse from Microsoft is still going strong.
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Logitech has a lot of experience, i give you that. My MX518 lasted over 10 years, many other owners reported the same. More recent products by them die often before five years of use. Perverse incentives, news at 11. Sorry for the snark.
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The article mentions that this gamepad was released in 2010, but also it's just a slight iteration on Logitech's Wireless RumblePad 2, a wireless version of the RumblePad 2 released around 2004.
The newer models just add X-input, change the button faces from 1234 to ABXY, and made the wireless receiver smaller.
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Even high end Logitech peripherals aren't exactly great. I bought a Logitech wireless keyboard with backlighting a few years ago. It was nice but there was some hardware bug and when not in use the lights would be flashing all day and night until the batteries run out [0]. I certainly hope their gamepads are more energy efficient than that!
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/LogitechG/comments/pt0fkp/logitech_...
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FWIW, I'd estimate that Microsoft has sold something like 200 million Xbox controllers.
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This type/class of wireless controllers are noticeably less dense and flimsier. They are not necessarily built worse, but this is "get what you pay for" product, which is to say it's great for undergraduate robotics projects that Microsoft or Sony designs at ~$65 is either an overkill or too complicated to interface with.
My work Logitech G502 wired mouse is in its 7th month of light use (only used on in-office days) and the cable has already split where it connects to the mouse.
Mass manufactured devices - particularly when they're mature - have the costs squeezed out of them to maximize profit. That means they ride the line close to failure to end of warranty.
I think I've seen Microsoft selling Logitech devices with Microsoft logos on them.
The Xbox Elite 2 controller costs $150 and is a reliability nightmare. It has the look and feel of a premium product, but there are at least three components that are commonly reported breaking after fairly light use (like, after 100 hours of gaming). Analog stick drift, shoulder buttons that register duplicate presses, and face buttons (usually the A) that stop registering presses. All of these issues are still unfixed years after release.
Given that's what their flagship controller is like, they either don't do a lot of reliability testing or are ignoring the results.
>Microsoft very certainly did a tons of reliability and durability testing on their controllers (and it shows).
my xbox elite controller didn't even last a year (usb port died)... now tbf the x button on the replacement razer controller i got also died in the same time frame.
to be more fair though the wired xbox 360 controller i got with my original xbox back in ~2007 has never let me down.
I've lost two 360 controllers, one started freaking out on the inputs and the other one's right analog stick just chipped off one day
> I personally believe using mass market makes sense. I don't understand the criticism I've seen on this website for using off the shelf controllers or camping lights (what do you expect, an LED strip magically engineered by a large aeronautics firm specifically for the sub? and what would that change?).
Using something off the shelf is completely fine, but it doesn't get you off the hook from doing the work of certifying that it's safe and fit for purpose. If you've ever used a modern game controller (even ones made by Microsoft), many of them are prone to issues with the potentiometer which causes the joysticks to drift subtly in one or more directions. Not ideal for controlling life critical systems.
Hey at least it's not a madcatz controller!
Throwback! They were great for cheap controllers.
Logitech is a "cheap third party"?
I like MS hardware, but my goodness, calling Logitech that is clearly missing something in the accuracy department. Logitech is way more experienced at making and selling input devices than MS.
I agree with you in principle on your defense of Logitech, but if there’s a company that can give Logitech a run for their money in terms of designing and selling input peripherals, it probably is Microsoft. There are very few extant input peripheral manufacturers that have been doing it as long or longer than Microsoft has, so it would be an overstatement to say they’re way more experienced”. Logitech has released to market more peripherals overall though since that’s pretty much their entire business.
Logitech is more experienced in making money by selling crappy devices that fail on you right after the warranty expired.
I thought both companies started making mice at about the same time.
As an amateur EE, using mass market is a braindead idea in this case.
The controller is not built to deal with high humidity which I assume is a given in this kind of sub.
Another reason is that these devices are built out of very cheap components and are not at all designed to be reliable. You can easily design a controller that is much more reliable.
Having your multi million dollar sub grounded because you allowed a cheap component on board is pretty stupid imo.
I mostly agree but my knee-jerk concern is mostly what's not the controller. The USB port, the driver, the operating system, and the computer.
All of that worries me at a glance, but I absolutely have no awareness of the options in this space or what can be done to mitigate risks re: reliability.
> Microsoft very certainly did a tons of reliability and durability testing on their controllers
I don't think they tested them 2.5 miles underwater though. Even if the cabin is pressurized, electronics can behave differently there.
Also assuming that weight isn't an issue, the controller being $30 makes redundancy easy. Just like every other kid playing video games, simply have a second one in case the first one fails.
It's small, cheap and replaced in seconds.
It's also wireless. Do they have an easy way of pairing a new controller?
I don’t trust playing games with third party controllers and to control a submarine with a 3rd-party control blows my mind.
Third party controllers never work quite as well.
> (and it shows)
bought two official xbox controllers and they both broke within six months so…
You would think that but the Nintendo Switch controller still has analog stick drift many years after being discovered.
Logitech has even more experience than Microsoft in doing controllers
the logitech controller has a switch to change between direct input / x-input
The Xbox controllers are used to control the periscope which is not a safety critical device. Regardless, the navy uses wired controllers and did extensive testing and verification. This outfit didn't do anything like that; in one video with a journalist the bluetooth controller was a 'feature' because they could pass it around the sub.
The testing and verification is key. It might even be they were trying to lean on some work done by the navy on the Xbox 360 controller and that got switched along the line for the Logitech, losing one of the main reasons for using the original choice.
In any case, I would hope they brought a spare (or had an alternative method to drive, even if cumbersome), as easy spares is one of the selling points of COTS parts (and long as you verify it's the real part and isn't a revision that looks the same invalidating your testing).
I wonder if using an XInput controller has a perk in that it’s relatively straightforward to find a second source if needed. Or, if one manufacturer isn’t working for them, they have a specification for controlling the periscope.
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.
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US UAV/Drones use xbox controllers too
There was video floating around of a machine gun turret being remote controlled using the Valve Steamdeck in Ukraine.
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/steam-deck-controls-a-real...
Edit: consumer joysticks normally use potentiometers, which aren't great for deadzones/drift. For things like dust incursion reasons along it would make sense for any industrial/military device to be using hall effect based joysticks.
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Unmanned, if anything a controller failing will save some lives.
Unmanned, and they have logic to autopilot in most cases.
The periscope is a combat critical device, lose control of it and the enemy will see you first and you're dead.
Periscopes haven't been combat critical on submarines since slightly after WW2. They rely mostly on sonar to detect enemies, not vision - and of course they would. Periscopes are useless against submarines, and if an anti-submarine ship is nearby, you wouldn't go to periscope depth putting the submarine in a perilous position, and showing it off at that.
It's something that can be quickly swapped out if it does fail though being a wired controller, I'd put decent odds on this company not bothering to put a backup controller in their death tube. Also a periscope is less critical to combat in the age of sonar that can tell you bearing, heading and what type of ship often without the risk of surfacing and getting lit up on radar. Modern subs basically never want to surface in combat there's no need to take the added risk.
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Worth noting they use the controller to steer the periscope, not the sub. A component failure there has a significantly smaller risk to human life.
Oh absolutely and probably with a manual backup too.
Or you know, another $30 controller or two. I know space is limited but it shouldn't be too much to have a little redundancy on controller systems.
The controller itself is probably reliable enough, like any cheap keyboard on amazon. I wouldn't want my life to rely on bluetooth though.
I don't even want my music listening to depend on bluetooth.
If there’s one place I’d bet my life on Bluetooth it’s at the bottom of the ocean with absolutely no other signals of any kind
Except the smartphones everyone brought along.
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Absolutely. The fella in the article is going wired though by the look of it.
They have a couple of pretty good shots of the controller, and I don't see a wire. Also, the marketing image they include for the controller is clearly labeled as wireless.
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The moment the crew enters onboard and their mobiles have bluetooth enabled, a race of pairing sounds ensues.
I mean the xbox and Playstation controllers are both actually really good, sturdy, reliable controllers; I'm sure a contractor could do "better" for whatever meaning of the word better for specialist cases like the military, but... why? If an xbox controller breaks, they can just pull out a new one.
War is as much about cost as it is about effective means of killing others. I can't say how much it's used because of a confirmation / media bias, but cheap drones are used effectively in Ukraine, plain commercial off the shelf drones (with matching controllers) with a bomb strapped to them taking out tanks and crews (who often leave their hatch open in the clips I've seen).
A few hundred bucks to take out a multi million tank sounds like a really good exchange.
> I mean the xbox and Playstation controllers are both actually really good, sturdy, reliable controllers
In point of fact they are not. The PS5 controller has poor battery life and both have stick drift issues because they use cheap analogue sensors. The current generation of Nintendo controllers are similar: stick drift and battery issues are common. And then there are issues with wireless interference which can be a serious problem and, when it is, difficult to diagnose and fix. I don't think the Logitech controller in question even has wired as an option though of course I have no idea if that's relevant to the incident at all.
Yeah, I'm not convinced this is in any way related to the issues. I'm far more concerned with the system that such a controller was plugged into than the controller itself.
Commercial off the shelf pc? What kind of redundancy? How was power and power backup managed?
The guidance and control system seems to run on a GTK (?) app running on what looks like Ubuntu 10.04. An HDMI cable can be seen running to the monitor.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClkytJa0ghc&t=33s
If I had to take a random guess, this system is probably some form of an embedded Atom/Geode type device (if not just a notebook PC) with some CAN or RS485/422/232 interfaces attached via USB.
Trusting your life to Bluetooth on Linux. Ouch.
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It wasn't plugged in. It was a bluetooth controller.
I saw a video about that earlier. I think that part surprised me more than anything else. I was also surprised at just how close they would come to objects.
It sounds like the screens could be used as backup control mechanisms, but I wonder how much time they'd lose making that transition.
> The US Navy uses an Xbox 360 controller in active service
To control periscopes (“photonics masts”), and some other equipment, not for primary control of manned vehicles, that I can find any indication of.
The YouTube channel SmarterEveryDay was invited to film on an Ohio class nuclear submarine training in the Arctic. [0] You can see how many of the system are mechanical and not electronic in the demonstration especially the ballast controls. Most if not all boats and ships can control the throttle mechanically so if the boat loses its electronics such as a wave smashing the windshield in, it is still possible to control the rudder and throttles. I was very surprised at the lack if mechanical controls on the recreational submarine.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFJnWp1tAdU
I trust an Xbox 360 controller a whole lot more than I trust a Logitech controller. First party game console controllers are generally very robust and the 360 one is a classic. Third party are hit or miss but usually miss.
The issue most people on Reddit were discussing is that it’s a cheap off brand controller, rather than a higher quality name brand controller (from Sony or Microsoft)
How is Logitech “off brand”. They are well known for input devices.
Their controllers are well known for being garbage. People that take video games seriously can tell you all of the different reasons why they "feel worse" or are just less reliable than OEM. It's a $30 controller where the "standard" option is around $60. The "premium" market where they are custom made for important use cases (ie, competitive Melee tournament) can easily reach into multiple hundreds of dollars, using components like hall effect sensors instead of resistive potentiometers that will lose accuracy over time.
Most people would refuse to play a video game with this controller, let alone use it as a critical component in a vehicle. Joystick drift in a videogame is frustrating. Joystick drift in a fucking submarine is a disaster waiting to happen.
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I've been using Logitech input devices since before Sony or Microsoft ever made one.
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Their game controllers are low quality. For example, home and professional desktop flight simulators prefer to use VKB or Virpil joysticks instead of Logitech or Thrustmaster.
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It's Reddit
Military loves COTS. You've also got a user interface that many in the service would already be familiar with.
I doubt anyone thinks this is why the sub went missing.
It's just funny that the submarine, which went missing, and is now notorious for skimping on safety, went with a generic "third party" controller instead of something higher quality, like a genuine Xbox controller from Microsoft.
You think it’s funny that these people are most likely dying or dead right now?
> Nothing to say this is the cause of the fault and probably going to be more reliable than something hand rolled.
Also, COTS gear that's designed with a standard interface is by design trivial to replace even through hot swapping, which automatically means resilience against errors.
Fun fact: DOD likes game pads because soldiers all play videos game since birth and it requires the least training.
Not just video games, video games that intentionally mimic the job they're performing. The only real difference is that you don't get achievement pop-ups or announcements. And, of course, that you kill or maim human beings in the process, but that is intentional.
Logitech F710 has been the least reliable controller I have ever used. Connectivity and driver issues all over the place across all Windows OS's I have ever had the displeasure of using it with. Once I switched to Xbox controllers on my Win machine those issues were a thing of the past.
Yes but that is the Xbox 360 controller, the greatest controller of all time. This is... logitech.
I once spole to a team thay used a wireless controller to control a robot. If that particular wireless controller ran out of battery or lost sognal for any reason, the dongle in the PC kept the command, i.e. move forward, forever. You'd have to chase the robot around.
Thats thw kind of thing you have to test for
Yes, but interesting they don't use it to drive the sub, or for other mission or life critical tasks... in this sub they did seemingly
xbox 360 controllers last only 6 months to a couple years with various failures that don't matter when you're playing a video game with them but can actually get you killed if they fail when you're in deep ocean. These are not ok for controls in vehicles where failure can mean everyone onboard dies. The navy does not use these for critical system controls. They were never built or tested for that.
How are you treating your controllers? I still have working PS2 and 360 controllers from back in the day.
I have thousands of hours of playtime on CoD4, MW2, and countless PC games over the course of about 15 years on my 360 controller I've had since I was a teenager. I've had to replace the joysticks a couple of times, and opened it up to clean it a few more times than that. wth are you doing to your controllers that they die in 6 months?
They do for drones. But plenty of spares available.
> Mass market has a lot of R&D to leverage so it makes sense. Nothing to say this is the cause of the fault and probably going to be more reliable than something hand rolled.
Consumer grade products aren't built to last, they are built to be cheap so they can sell them to actual consumers
We all know how the military ends up using these consumer grade products; lobbying, aka deep state corruption "if that happens in a foreign country"
Hololens didn't find commercial success, yet ended up with the military, soldiers weren't happy when it was time to use the actual consumer grade product ;)
> 'The devices would have gotten us killed.'
https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/13/23402195/microsoft-us-ar...
> Consumer grade products aren't built to last, they are built to be cheap so they can sell them to actual consumers
Video game gamepads are probably some of the most well designed pieces of equipment I know of, with each part having a guaranteed lifetime of clicks and/or swipes, and other such details.
Video gamers are really obsessive over these details. It wouldn't be surprising to me if the latest hall-effect sensor joypads are the best durability in the world for thumbpads.
That being said: a cheap Logitech controller would be an old potentiometer-based controller with far less durability. I'm sure if I asked around, someone out there knows the specifications and would know when to regularly replace that gamepad after X-hours of use (and I'd expect X-hours to be in excess of 1000 hours, maybe even 10,000+ hours, even for a gamepad like that)
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I think where video gamers are getting wow'd is that... they weren't using like a brand-name controller here. $30 Logitech is low-end. Video gamers know which controllers to rely upon.
Bottom of the barrel $30 Logitech is barely something I feel good about giving to a friend during a gaming session, let alone a life-or-death equipment choice for steering a submarine. You get far more reliable, higher-quality gamepads at the $50 or even $80 levels.
I don't think video gamers would be hating on these guys if they used... I dunno... an 8bitdo + GuliKit Hall Effect controller. We'd all be like "Oh yeah, that's quality stuff" (the Bluetooth is unreliable but I assume some kind of wired version is available somewhere...)
The top end joysticks used in video game tournaments for maximum reliability are easily $200+.
> The top end joysticks used in video game tournaments for maximum reliability are easily $200+.
Not the $30 Logitech controller, ever heard of joystick drift? plastic is plastic, imagine you in a mission, and your joystick starts to drift
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> Bottom of the barrel $30 Logitech is barely something I feel good about giving to a friend during a gaming session, let alone a life-or-death equipment choice for steering a submarine.
I wish my friend whose mom bought him MadCatz controllers had your manners and sense of propriety.
> Consumer grade products aren't built to last, they are built to be cheap so they can sell them to actual consumers
They are so cheap you can carry a lot of spares. Controllers get pretty well abused by gamers, so they aren't exactly fragile.
Google F170 repair videos, there seems to be a lot of issues with this controller.