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Comment by bradstewart | Hacker News Reader

Power loss?

Power loss is a real stretch to happen at the same time of communications, I understand that the coms to fail is a non-zero chance of failing, it happens. A transponder is super rare on it's own, but when they both go at the same time, protocol dictates you declare an emergency straight await (the top-side cnc). Not that it would have made a difference, but they certainly would have told the coast guard all of this. Even after waiting FAR too long IMO.

Comms need power...

Yes indeed, but the transponder itself is a self-powered device, they are battery powered when needed and those batteries are usually no joke from the ones I've encountered, as it should be. Specific times I'm not sure. I'll link one I have worked extensively with. They are designed to be extremely fault tolerant with a lot of redundancy and fail safes.

It's genuinely extremely hard to not notice it losing power.

V5 https://www.sonardyne.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Sonardy...

Edit: Battery Life (Listening, Disabled) 417 days (Lithium) 417 days (Lithium)

It's actually longer than I even imagined. And this is an old version I believe.

The thing uses Bluetooth for mission-critical controls, so maybe assuming that they implemented best practices is not exactly correct.

The Logitech controller they used uses a proprietary wireless dongle, not BT. No pairing is involved.

The fascination with the gaming controller is a bit silly.

It's not safety critical like the ability to drop ballast is. If something goes wrong with it you just kill propulsive power, resurface, and replace it. Also more engineering effort will have gone into making the controller reliable by its manufacturer than most would want to be able to justify spending creating something custom.

But a lot of owners of this controller had serious issues with it.

Why is that notable?

I wouldn’t expect it to be more reliable - or less likely to cause harmful interference — than using Bluetooth.

I just see this mistake a lot. I own this controller, and as long as it's reasonably close to the dongle, the connection is rock-solid. No disconnections as you would get with a bonafide Bluetooth link -- the dongle is paired to the controller out of the box.

> The thing uses Bluetooth for mission-critical controls

Mission critical - I'm not a marine, but as I heard they did have redundancies for buoyancy. If the best of the worst happened, I would guess they would have surfaced pretty soon..

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