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I read that military used Xbox controller because it was more intuitive than traditional method.
But I do hope that they update / change their gamepad regularly, because thumbstick drift is a thing.
Isn’t the Xbox controller only used for the periscope?
There’s various photos online of US and UK militaries using xbox controllers to pilot UAV’s.
That sounds like a perfect use for them!
It’s even funnier than that. Appearently, for drones they made drone pilots design their optimal input device, and the result was basically a replica of a commonly used Xbox controller. The legal department was dumbfounded because there’s obviously protections for an Xbox controller and they just resorted back to the original.
I mean there is something to be said for KISS (keep it simple stupid) principles. Especially in an environment that is very unforgiving. In fact in SCUBA there is even a rebreather named as such [1].
And something like an xbox controller is both well engineered and quite intuitive. That said…you are going to want redundancy.
For example I believe SpaceX Dragon uses largely off the shelf computers running linux [2], and not the older rad hardened versions many other space programs require. That said…they also setup them as a to work in triplicate to ensure quorum on the data validity and then have a backup set fo computer in case they cant get quorum out of the primary.
[1] https://www.kissrebreathers.com/
[2] https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/9243/what-computer-and-software-is-used-by-the-falcon-9