While rescuers fear for crew, Logitech F710 PC gamepad sells out within minutes.
  • galaxyawesome@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    After seeing pics of the submarine, it seems like the Logitech controller is actually the least sketchy part.

    • MercuryUprising@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      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.

  • WhoRoger@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • khepri@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    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?

  • tal@kbin.social
    1·
    1 year ago

    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.