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Comment by _ea1k | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I'm not convinced this is in any way related to the issues. I'm far more concerned with the system that such a controller was plugged into than the controller itself.

Commercial off the shelf pc? What kind of redundancy? How was power and power backup managed?

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The guidance and control system seems to run on a GTK (?) app running on what looks like Ubuntu 10.04. An HDMI cable can be seen running to the monitor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClkytJa0ghc&t=33s

If I had to take a random guess, this system is probably some form of an embedded Atom/Geode type device (if not just a notebook PC) with some CAN or RS485/422/232 interfaces attached via USB.

Trusting your life to Bluetooth on Linux. Ouch.

Yeah, I had the same thought. I really hope they had more of a safety plan than that.

It turns out it wasn't Bluetooth - it was one of those proprietary radios with a USB dongle which should be a lot more reliable. But still... it doesn't sound like they had any kind of backup at all. Maybe they just didn't talk about the backups?

wifi dongles aren't exactly bullet proof. For example if you use a cycling turbo trainer with a power meter, a macbook and an ANT+ (2.4ghz) dongle there's a good chance you've had to buy a 6 foot extender cable so get the dongle far enough away from the macbook because something about the macbook itself interferes with the signal. It's a known thing among home training cyclists.

It wasn't plugged in. It was a bluetooth controller.

I saw a video about that earlier. I think that part surprised me more than anything else. I was also surprised at just how close they would come to objects.

It sounds like the screens could be used as backup control mechanisms, but I wonder how much time they'd lose making that transition.

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