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by taneq 1097 days ago
> You have the old guard, NASA

I thought the latest round of NASA missions were using commodity hardware and taking the fail-early-fail-often approach (at least compared to the old days)? And in doing so have delivered, all failures included, the most bang per buck of any NASA missions?

Not saying I'd trust my life to a gamepad alone, but pragmatism is a virtue in engineering.
2 comments
whywhywhywhy 1097 days ago
> Not saying I'd trust my life to a gamepad alone

I’d trust it to an Xbox, PlayStation controller, they’re some of the most reliability tested input devices ever. Most people are freaking out because it’s some known glitchy budget gamepad.

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taneq 1096 days ago
From a functional safety perspective if you can't verify each step from the initial risk assessment to the final product, you can't prove the overall risk reduction and therefore don't know the overall residual hazard. From that perspective this sub would never have left dry dock (or possibly the CAD model).

In practical terms if push came to shove, an Xbox or PS controller is probably more reliable than most equivalent devices. My stock phrase when comparing normal functions with Safety Instrumented Functions is "I'd trust this with my car, but not my life."

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consp 1097 days ago
My playstation controller of less than a year old has stick drift so ymmv and you definately need backups. N=1 ofcourse but it's not that rare.
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whywhywhywhy 1096 days ago
PS1 PS2 PS3 PS4 PS5 had two controllers each system, no drift or weirdness.

Yeah someone must have it but we’re talking most of my life here no issues, I’d trust these controllers.

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_djo_ 1097 days ago
Not quite. They're experimenting with commodity hardware to provide additional experimental functionality on missions, not to replace the core mission hardware.

For instance the mars helicopter, Ingenuity, was effectively an expendable part of the Perseverance rover mission. Even if it never took off they'd still consider the overall mission a success. That it has worked so well despite using commodity hardware has been a nice surprise and might result in NASA using more of it, but the Perseverance rover still used proper rad-hardened chips and other specialised spacecraft components.

They're also definitely not using commodity hardware and fail-fast-fail-often on crewed aircraft.

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