U.S. Navy to use Xbox 360 controllers to operate periscopes aboard submarines

Re:U.S. Navy to use Xbox 360 controllers to operate periscop... by chuckdries on Tuesday September 19, 2017 @07:54AM (#15283775)

The xinput gamepad is a pervasive standard, with plenty of third party hardware implementations and wide software support across operating systems. Heck, even Chrome and Firefox have JS apis to access xbox controller input.

Eventually it will be surpassed, but it's far more available and supported than whatever they were doing before, and its simple enough to be easy to continue to manufacture.

Also, do we really think the military couldn't find someone to contract with to continue making them if they needed to? Knock offs are $20 on Amazon, they're very simple devices.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:U.S. Navy to use Xbox 360 controllers to operate periscop... by JustSomeNobody on Tuesday September 19, 2017 @08:16AM (#15283927)

> Knock offs are $20 on Amazon, they're very simple devices.

And that goes right into cstross' second point...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:U.S. Navy to use Xbox 360 controllers to operate periscop... by Sebguer on Tuesday September 19, 2017 @09:10AM (#15284268)

Their point was very obviously not that we should buy the $20 knock-offs, but that building these devices is very simple and can be done cheaply.

[ Parent | on HN ]