49
Submarine missing near Titanic used a $30 Logitech gamepad for steering
(arstechnica.com)
Breaking news from around the world.
News that is American but has an international facet may also be posted here.
These guidelines will be enforced on a know-it-when-I-see-it basis.
For US News, see the US News community.
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
Devils advocate, most off the shelf mass market electronics are actually quite reliable. Having custom made hardware often means poor firmware support, extreme costs, and difficult to debug.
Nothing wrong with using off the shelf electronics, especially since the interior of the submarine is atmospheric pressure.
I have no idea if they actually had spares, but there's something to be said for having three $30 off the shelf parts over one $200 custom part, provided that failure isn't immediately catastrophic.
Around the 1 minute mark, he does mention that they keep spares onboard.
Ahh, good to know, thanks! So we can scratch that off of the list of stupid things they did, although the lack of a transponder beacon and a surface egress option are still pretty high on the list.
Even if they were to surface. The latch is only able to be opened from outside. So unless they are found they will still die in 40 hours.
Yeah, I'm totally with you there!
At least they seem to have had several ways of surfacing, including at least 2 options without power and 1 deadman switch kinda situation with hooks releasing ballast after a certain amount of time.