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A comment on The MTA's Oldest Controls Kept Going During the Tech Outage.

Re:The MTA's Oldest Controls Kept Going During the Tech Outage by adolph on Monday July 22, 2024 @12:38AM (#41030966)
MTA knocked together a system that was comparatively half-baked. It is not wired into the mechanical signals, nor does it control the switches or link up to the PA. Instead, each train running on the lettered lines was equipped with a Bluetooth beacon (yes, the same technology that powers your wireless mouse) that trips a receiver as the subway nears a station, which then triggers the LCD screen over the platform to update.

That seems like a prudent approach, not half baked. Keep the ancillary system air-gapped from the life critical parts.

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Re:The MTA's Oldest Controls Kept Going During the Tech Outage by parl_match on Monday July 22, 2024 @05:02AM (#41032226)
Yeah, detaching niceties from safety critical systems isn't half baked at all.

I agree that being able to get the live data straight off of the signals would probably be "better", in that it'd be more accurate and timely, but building that in to the existing framework would have been really expensive and risky.

What they landed on is an excellent solution.

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