← Back to context

Comment by shotnothing

14 days ago

> They rather famously switched to an Xbox controller for their rolling drones, and for their submarine controls, because they just work better.

Like oceangate?

The shortcoming of the control scheme was that they wired the motors to respond to the controller wrong. That is, pitch was wired to yaw and vice versa. The controller just sends signals (digital values, specifically), what you do with them is up to you.

If you don’t need accurate force-feedback, just highly reliable transmission of inputs, why wouldn’t you use the final iteration of a controller that millions of players have spent billions of hours using and abusing?

It’s not even a Bluetooth controller, it’s just standard USB. The folks who were shitting on that design decision (and not the carbon fiber hull decision), have no sense of what’s common, or even possible, on a microcontroller device.