Would be great to be able to read all of these as a single article! (I'm intrigued, but I'm not saving 13 blog posts to my read-it-later app. Even stitched together, it wouldn't be the longest in my list by a long shot.)
I agree and sometimes email authors to ask if they would compile (or should I say link?) a multipart article into a single piece before we put it into the second-chance pool. But even I was afraid of how long this one would turn out to be.
For articles like these, I use shiori; it's a webclipper that saves html to an sqlite database. Then you can concatenate them with a single sql statement. If the final product is particularly long, then I use calibre convert the result to an epub to read on my phone and/or ereader.
TFA is nothing short of amazing and absolutely deserves attention.
The author (and his brother) built (from scratch!) a side-scan sonar remote controlled boat and an ROV (a remote controlled submersible) with a camera and a light, and with this they found TWO missing persons' cars under water. Real products of these sorts would have cost enormous amounts of money, but they built their own for the cost of parts and labor (sure, lots of labor). They did this on a lark.
You can buy similar off the shelf, the way these diy projects go it may have been cheaper in the long run, but more power to him. It can be hard to drop 5 grand on a kitted out submarine when you think you might be able to do it for 2k in parts in your own labor, but in my experience that 2k in parts starts to creep up as you accidentally destroy things, determine that the things you bought and can't return won't quite work, etc.
There is a guy that has been using one of the off the shelf ones in the lakes around seattle (https://www.youtube.com/@rctestflight/videos), he's also built a bunch of other rc stuff including a few autonomous boats that he takes into the lakes as well as the sound.
I just started reading, and I am making the faux-pas of commenting before finishing.
But, I'm wondering what the challenges are of automating the ROV to map a body of water's floor in a pattern. like a grid pattern, or whatever is most efficient.
At first I was thinking currents would cause displacement. but can't we sense the current moving us in undesirable ways and correct with thrusters?
And then I thought.. do lakes have currents? Do they have tides? can a ROV sense the boundary of a lake?
just further down the rabbit hole, realizing how little I've learned about the natural environment!
I wonder if pedantically speaking the definition of lake would include non-tidal in many countries but ....
A) humans use names sloppily and if it's an important detail I wouldn't assume a lake is non-tidal without checking.
B) non-tidal bodies of water might still change height over the year, for example after a heavy rainfall.
Mainly I'd question the need to automate it. It's difficult, and in many cases the cost of a human to drive it is tiny compared to all the other costs you need to pay so just do that (as in the article - those weren't automated). Also, driving them can be fun :-)
Lübecks university has several projects[1] using swarms of robots for automatic cartography, water measurements and such.
Autonomous accurate navigation under water is quite complicated, because after a certain point you need to start relying on local sensors because nothing reaches you anymore. But local sensors tend to be weird, because a straight line underwater is not necessarily a straight line - you are most likely drifting -- and detecting drift isn't easy. From a local observer, the water around you isn't even moving. That was a fun team to talk with.
I loved the project!! I also like how “messy” the room is, reminded me of my room (1) when I was working from home years ago.
I haven’t read the whole thing but I will, however, I did go through the technical details, some notes:
> This model didn’t have a long enough range on the analog sticks
I see you are using Radiomaster tx16s, pro tip: You can use ELRS 2W model on BOTH transmitter and the receiver, don’t use the typical receiver unit, use another transmitter and flash it as a receiver, and you would have 2W on both sides, preferably 900mhz not 2.4ghz, and you would’ve hundreds of kilometers of range and strong obstacles penetration.
For the camera and the tether, technically you can get rid of the tether and use wireless comms, but probably what you did is the best for bucks solution.
I'm guessing that the range of resistance values over the full swept range of the sticks was small, and so getting precise enough values/smooth enough change out of it wasn't possible. (Assuming these things basically have X and Y potentiometers for each stick.)
> I'm guessing that the range of resistance values over the full swept range of the sticks was small
My assumption was they meant the distance of movement on those small joysticks was too small, so the precision problem wasn't measuring the resistance, but in accurately moving the sticks to the right place to get the desired control input when they only have tiny amounts of travel.
I first read it seven years ago and similar to the author, it inspired me to join my local Search & Rescue team which has been incredibly rewarding. I highly recommend doing that to anyone who wants to combine a love of the outdoors, specialized skills, serving the community, and helping people in their worst moments. (And doesn't mind getting up at 3am in pouring rain and going out and pushing through dense underbrush for hours!)
Ouch, I'm sort of annoyed that the author was inspired to be long-winded and have 16 or more parts to his story. I'm up to part 2 and there's a fear of disappointment that it'll be a boring waste of time. (In comparison to the Death Valley Germans story, which was captivating!)
I just finished the ROV series of posts. It was sufficiently captivating. I enjoyed his narrative - I can see that he was inspired by Mahood's writing style as well as his quest.
Yes. It varies from team to team. Ours is a 4.1 mile hike (with 2,500+ ft. Elevation gain) carrying a 25 lb pack in under 2 and 1/2 hours.
I'm also a volunteer firefighter and the "pack test" level of Work Capacity Test for wildland firefighters is 3 mi on flat ground carrying a 45 lb pack in 45 minutes.
It is pretty important to be in shape as you are often carrying a lot of gear and don't want to bonk and cause an issue that would jeopardize yourself, your teammates, or the mission.
Edit: to answer your second question, my wife and I hike recreationally just about every weekend and the team often hikes during trainings and does a weekly casual hike as well.
Thanks for this info. This is something I've been thinking about doing in a few years (once the kids are further along). Seems like a very cool thing to do.
It was fine when I read the first five or so installments, then I got a random authentication request, which I couldn't see the cause of, but seems like it may have been triggered when I chucked an image. My guess is that during the time I was viewing the site, the owner decided they would lock it down to people who were authenticated.
Shame as I was just getting to the point of progress!
Curious. Maybe it was hugged to death and he or his ISP locked it down to cut down on bandwidth. Or maybe decided he didn't want a bunch of people reading it right now?
The site was posted here and probably other social media in the last day or so. More than likely it's to prevent the site from getting hugged to death.
As someone who has spent a fair bit of time around Death Valley, it really helped to illuminate how someone with no point of reference about the environment could really get themselves in trouble.
By the way, does anyone know why the site stopped being updated in 2019? Besides Death Valley Germans there were other interesting articles in there, about other Search & Rescue endeavors, Area 51, an interesting take on Bob Lazar etc. I hope the author is OK and in good health.
This was incredibly well written and the project itself was super cool to see come together. I worked on building UAV's in University but seeing the unique challenges with dealing with water from a signals perspective was really intriguing.
Good luck with any future cases and can't wait to see what upgrades you make!
Absolutely fantastic read. The author got nerd-sniped HARD by these missing-person cases and his approach and accomplishments are inspiring, to say the least. Very well done!
For the first case I kept wondering why they needed so much complicated technology. The water they’re searching isn’t all that deep a cheap canoe and a long pole with a go pro, and a magnet on a rope would have been equally effective, cheaper, and faster. But for the second case that they needed the be able to search a much wider area and the tire tracks likely wouldn’t have been visible in on a camera. Really cool project though.
For the ROV I was wondering why not build something heavier than water but have it on lines attached to buoys, then to go up/down you just climb or down the ropes. Not as maneuverable but not certain if it’s significantly less maneuverable.
> For the first case I kept wondering why they needed so much complicated technology.
"It's always in the last place I looked"
I think we're seeing the first few guesses for where the car might be, but according to the author, there was a 40km distance between the cabin and the girlfriend's town.
Hindsight is 20/20, but I wouldn't put it past the author to commit beyond 3 search sites, some of which may require deeper and larger bodies of water (like the second investigation did).
having built autonomous ROVs in college, i'm absolutely astonished at what this person accomplished essentially on their own. they are so finicky and piloting them is a whole skill set on its own.
and, what perseverance; it really did read like a detective story and what a good job distilling the cases down to their basics.
what a cool read and an absolute triumph of an accomplishment.
There is quite a bit of open source info out there on how to build these things these days. I think the quadcopter/'drone' boom kinda opened up the market for rc hobbies in general. I've seen guys with UHF fpv setups on planes fly for miles and miles and maintain signal. With purpose built antennas they can go even further. The legality is .. suspect at best, but shrug.
yeah, fair enough. we had to build virtually all of the software from scratch, including like, IPC. i wasn't involved as much with hardware but it does seem to be much more out there these days.
Funny, because I'd say that jargon is a facilitator of communication between knowledgeable people. It can always be looked up by those with the interest but not the knowledge. I end up doing this all the time, and appreciating reading dumps of domain knowledge and perspective. Meanwhile, writing everything for a lowest common denominator audience creates real barriers to communication - both destroying communications bandwidth, and also encouraging experts to retreat to less visible forums.
It would take the author a few seconds to type "remotely operated vehicle" (or whatever it stands for), and therefore save hours of time for people who need to look it up. Not to mention...I almost skipped the article because I didn't know what ROV stood for. Lost audience.
Your argument is that lots of experts on remotely operated vehicles would scoff at the article because it didn't use their "inside" jargon? First off, how many people would that be, compared to the number of people who love a good mystery and a good gadget, but have no idea what an ROV is?
As to bandwidth, you only have to spell it out once. Simple practice: I built a remotely-operated vehicle (ROV) and solved some cold missing person cases.
The author of this piece doesn't strike me as someone who relishes communicating in cryptic acronyms, so my guess is that it was just thoughtless. He hadn't yet seen my screed on the subject. :-)
I'm sure there are those who love communicating in cryptic code. They tend to congregate in like-minded cliques that don't much care about communicating outside their tightly-defined world. So be it. But if you want to be read and understood by a wide audience, spell it out.
Jargon generally takes on its own meaning and context beyond a naive reading. "ROV" customarily refers to an underwater remotely operated vehicle, not merely any "remotely operated vehicle" (contrast with flying "drones" or contemporary cars with cell modems). I'm nowhere near an expert or even frequent user of the term, that's just from my casual recollection and a quick search seems to back it up.
The proper comparison isn't the author's time versus the readers looking it up, but rather readers encountering a term for the first time having to look it up versus every other reader having to read overly verbose writing that reiterates basic definitions rather than getting to the novel points. If you're as interested in ROVs as you imply, well now you know for all of the other times you will read the term. If you're really expecting to never encounter the term again, I wonder why you're reading a technical engineering-adjacent forum.
And yes, effective communication within "like-minded cliques" is exactly what is facilitated by jargon. Personally I'd rather read concise technical descriptions from such direct communications (doing the work to learn what I don't know from context or external sources), rather than having to skim through watered-down general-audience "edutainment" articles and read between the lines to figure out the specific touchstones being referenced by canned general phrases.
>The proper comparison isn't the author's time versus the readers looking it up, but rather readers encountering a term for the first time having to look it up versus every other reader having to read overly verbose writing that reiterates basic definitions rather than getting to the novel points. If you're as interested in ROVs as you imply, well now you know for all of the other times you will read the term. If you're really expecting to never encounter the term again, I wonder why you're reading a technical engineering-adjacent forum.
This isn't a water hobbyists forum, nor one for all manner of remotely operated vehicles, so it's a bit optimistic to assume many people here will know "ROV" as a remote controlled submarine. Fact is, most of us cannot, from the title, figure out if we're interested, nor from skimming the first six (!) pages of a long article. Explaining ROV once at the beginning would, I dare say, not have impacted the enjoyment of underwater professionals very much, but saved me and most others on this forum some time figuring out if I want to figure it out.
I don't get this pigeonholing of the concern as being only about "water hobbyists" or "underwater professionals". It's literally just a type of machine you will become aware of some time during the course of reading about engineering or subsea operations. As I said, I'm not even fully sure it just applies to underwater vehicles yet I have bumped into the term/concept more than several times already in my life. If you're new and this is your first time encountering it, appreciate the learning opportunity. I bet you'll see the term a lot more now due to Baader-Meinhof.
> Fact is, most of us cannot, from the title, figure out if we're interested
This is a situation where HN’s “no editorialising titles” rule falls flat. Simply with the context change the title would be also best changed. I also understand why we have the rule of course.
> Explaining ROV once at the beginning would, I dare say, not have impacted the enjoyment of underwater professionals very much
Sure. There is a lot which could have been improved on the whole article with better editing.
Musk is always good for the 'hot take' that on the surface seems smart...but turns out it isn't, because he thinks that talking with an engineer in a specific area makes him qualified to talk like them. And then it turns out that he does the very thing he complains about.
What the fluff is a "Brick Monitor Board"? I'm a car nut and I know a lot about EVs, and my best guess: it's a submodule of the battery management system that monitors a group of cells, which I think the only reason I know to guess that is because I've watched youtube videos of tesla packs being repaired or torn down. IBST? Turns out that's the vacuum pump for the brake servo, and "I" means "electronic."
For the former, he was probably ranting about this because he's always struck me as a little insecure about being better than NASA (not really that hard) and thus is annoyed by NASA's fetish for backronyms...which I think it inherited from the military due to sleeping in the same bed for three quarters of a century, but also their convenience.
During all phases of a mission, there are often times where comms need to be fast (for example, when the flight director or whoever does it, asks each subsystem person if they're go for launch - there's a lot of those subsystem people and the "are you OK with us proceeding" happens multiple times just during the lead-up to launch. It's a lot faster to have the following conversation:
"ECS?" "Go."
"TACNAZ?" "Go."
"DONUT?" "Go."
If you're the astronaut, you don't want to be shouting "Electronic Cookie Stabilizer failure!" over the radio during an emergency, and anyone on the channel with you probably knows every acronym relating to the mission by heart..
Once I got to the end of the first page without finding out, I selected the "ROV" in the title and three-finger-touched my trackpad and it told me the answer. One of the little Mac niceties I'd struggle without.
I agree. I couldn't find the reference on the first few pages, so I pasted the URL to chatGPT and asked what is an ROV to get the context based on the article
Awesome story! The first case had me thinking "These nerds are wasting their time...why not just a gopro on a long stick". But hearing about the details of the second story, it would have been impossible without the sonar and ROV!
Posts like these really get down to the essence of Hacker News for me. Doing amazing, previously impossible things through sheer nerdy effort. What a deeply impressive story!
> So where was he going? I saw two possibilities: either to Tikkakoski to visit his ex-girlfrind he was on the phone with or; just to drive around with a new powerful car, to shake off the heated phone call.
I don't understand how suicide isn't at the top of the list here. He was obviously very upset emotionally. He didn't care for his belongs other than his phone. He didn't care to steal someone's car or answer for it. He never shows up anywhere.
Certainly. But some are much more common than others, and if you're playing the odds, as you must in these kinds of events, we can say that it's much more likely for an inexperienced driver to have an accident on pitch black wet roads, than that they attempted suicide in this unusual way.
This is amazing. A Finnish man gets curious about a missing persons case. He does some great detective work, and builds an ROV with side scanning sonar and video. The outcome, with some help from his brother, is just spectacular. I couldn't stop reading!
Everyone has watched a TV show where a case is slowly being solved, but who actually considers that oh yeah, I could actually become the person who searches for a random missing person case, instead of watching it on Netflix?
And the amount of McGyvering involved! How many people would have given up at one of the steps? Oh it requires coding in C++ for Arduino, sure, I'll just do that. Oh, it requires me to contact manufacturers to manufacture something, which I have never done, and I don't even know how to use a 3D modeling program. Sure, I'll just learn how to do that and then actually have it made. Pretty sure the give-up rate there would be very high!
If this were TV, people would hardly consider it plausible. And they did it, for real. And all out of just pure curiosity!
It’s funny that we all read forty pages of a “nobody” solving missing persons cases, and then we say “I would watch this miniseries if SOMEONE ELSE pitched it to Netflix.”
(Netflix employees have to pitch stories via agents, just like any “nobody” would, FWIW.)
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=1308760257416493671... ... "Environment-independent textile fiber identification using Wi-Fi channel state information", "Measurement of construction materials properties using Wi-Fi and convolutional neural networks"
I'm reminded of Baywatch S09E01; but those aren't actual trained lifeguards. The film Armageddon works as a training film because of all of the [safety,] mistakes: https://www.google.com/search?q=baywatch+s09e01
While I'm sure they did this to try to combine their talents and interests with altruism, what they got out of the end of that was both of those but also a legacy.
Most of us only wish we could tell stories like that as a result of the technical work we do.
Without a doubt the most interesting article I've read here. If they didn't sink in a car, am I correct to assume the bodies would have surfaced eventually?
Highly unlikely, since I presume all car windows would have been closed (winter in Finland is COLD) and they would have been strapped in with seatbelts. It's difficult to escape from a submerged car even in the best of circumstances, and being suddenly plunged into near-freezing water in the black of night is far from that.
While your reply is interesting to me, what I actually was asking was, "if these people died in circumstances that did NOT involve a car, but in the water, would the bodies have been found eventually because they float to the surface?"
Apparently bodies sink initially, float temporarily for a while due to bloating, then return to the bottom again after some decomposition. So you could easily miss the window if there are not good conditions to beach it I guess?
I hope you can take a break, burn out is real and it is important to take care of yourself! It is never too late to work on something you care about :)
166 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 73.0 ms ] threadhttps://suanto.com/2024/06/06/the-time-I-built-an-ROV-02/
https://suanto.com/2024/06/06/the-time-I-built-an-ROV-03/
https://suanto.com/2024/06/06/the-time-I-built-an-ROV-04/
https://suanto.com/2024/06/06/the-time-I-built-an-ROV-05/
https://suanto.com/2024/06/06/the-time-I-built-an-ROV-06/
https://suanto.com/2024/06/06/the-time-I-built-an-ROV-07/
https://suanto.com/2024/06/06/the-time-I-built-an-ROV-08/
https://suanto.com/2024/06/06/the-time-I-built-an-ROV-09/
https://suanto.com/2024/06/06/the-time-I-built-an-ROV-10/
https://suanto.com/2024/06/06/the-time-I-built-an-ROV-11/
https://suanto.com/2024/06/06/the-time-I-built-an-ROV-12/
https://suanto.com/2024/06/06/the-time-I-built-an-ROV-13/
But we got an email from a (unrelated) user saying it's good, so I've put it in the SCP (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308).
ROV = remotely operated vehicle btw
The author (and his brother) built (from scratch!) a side-scan sonar remote controlled boat and an ROV (a remote controlled submersible) with a camera and a light, and with this they found TWO missing persons' cars under water. Real products of these sorts would have cost enormous amounts of money, but they built their own for the cost of parts and labor (sure, lots of labor). They did this on a lark.
There is a guy that has been using one of the off the shelf ones in the lakes around seattle (https://www.youtube.com/@rctestflight/videos), he's also built a bunch of other rc stuff including a few autonomous boats that he takes into the lakes as well as the sound.
I just started reading, and I am making the faux-pas of commenting before finishing.
But, I'm wondering what the challenges are of automating the ROV to map a body of water's floor in a pattern. like a grid pattern, or whatever is most efficient.
At first I was thinking currents would cause displacement. but can't we sense the current moving us in undesirable ways and correct with thrusters?
And then I thought.. do lakes have currents? Do they have tides? can a ROV sense the boundary of a lake?
just further down the rabbit hole, realizing how little I've learned about the natural environment!
The way to do it is have a boat with GPS tow your sensor array.
I wonder if pedantically speaking the definition of lake would include non-tidal in many countries but ....
A) humans use names sloppily and if it's an important detail I wouldn't assume a lake is non-tidal without checking.
B) non-tidal bodies of water might still change height over the year, for example after a heavy rainfall.
Mainly I'd question the need to automate it. It's difficult, and in many cases the cost of a human to drive it is tiny compared to all the other costs you need to pay so just do that (as in the article - those weren't automated). Also, driving them can be fun :-)
Autonomous accurate navigation under water is quite complicated, because after a certain point you need to start relying on local sensors because nothing reaches you anymore. But local sensors tend to be weird, because a straight line underwater is not necessarily a straight line - you are most likely drifting -- and detecting drift isn't easy. From a local observer, the water around you isn't even moving. That was a fun team to talk with.
1: https://www.iti.uni-luebeck.de/en/research-areas/mobile-robo...
What you are describing would be called a UUV (unmanned underwater vehicle) or AUV (autonomous underwater vehicle).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34676129
I haven’t read the whole thing but I will, however, I did go through the technical details, some notes:
> This model didn’t have a long enough range on the analog sticks
I see you are using Radiomaster tx16s, pro tip: You can use ELRS 2W model on BOTH transmitter and the receiver, don’t use the typical receiver unit, use another transmitter and flash it as a receiver, and you would have 2W on both sides, preferably 900mhz not 2.4ghz, and you would’ve hundreds of kilometers of range and strong obstacles penetration.
For the camera and the tether, technically you can get rid of the tether and use wireless comms, but probably what you did is the best for bucks solution.
Overall, looks great!
(1) https://tamim.io/professional_projects/nerds-heavy-lift-dron...
I'm guessing that the range of resistance values over the full swept range of the sticks was small, and so getting precise enough values/smooth enough change out of it wasn't possible. (Assuming these things basically have X and Y potentiometers for each stick.)
[1] https://suanto.com/2024/06/06/the-time-I-built-an-ROV-06/
My assumption was they meant the distance of movement on those small joysticks was too small, so the precision problem wasn't measuring the resistance, but in accurately moving the sticks to the right place to get the desired control input when they only have tiny amounts of travel.
https://www.otherhand.org/home-page/search-and-rescue/the-hu...
I first read it seven years ago and similar to the author, it inspired me to join my local Search & Rescue team which has been incredibly rewarding. I highly recommend doing that to anyone who wants to combine a love of the outdoors, specialized skills, serving the community, and helping people in their worst moments. (And doesn't mind getting up at 3am in pouring rain and going out and pushing through dense underbrush for hours!)
I'm also a volunteer firefighter and the "pack test" level of Work Capacity Test for wildland firefighters is 3 mi on flat ground carrying a 45 lb pack in 45 minutes.
It is pretty important to be in shape as you are often carrying a lot of gear and don't want to bonk and cause an issue that would jeopardize yourself, your teammates, or the mission.
Edit: to answer your second question, my wife and I hike recreationally just about every weekend and the team often hikes during trainings and does a weekly casual hike as well.
His latest post is from a year ago: http://perryscanlon.com/MSJinfo_phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=6....
The Hunt for the Death Valley Germans (2012) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40568151 - June 2024 (2 comments)
The Hunt for the Death Valley Germans (2012) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34676129 - Feb 2023 (147 comments)
The Hunt for the Death Valley Germans - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32871761 - Sept 2022 (3 comments)
The Hunt for the Death Valley Germans (2012) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23582417 - June 2020 (75 comments)
Hunt for the Death Valley Germans (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19263057 - Feb 2019 (38 comments)
The Hunt for the Death Valley Germans - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12019567 - July 2016 (61 comments)
The Hunt for the Death Valley Germans - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9723065 - June 2015 (1 comment)
Good luck with any future cases and can't wait to see what upgrades you make!
:-D
For the ROV I was wondering why not build something heavier than water but have it on lines attached to buoys, then to go up/down you just climb or down the ropes. Not as maneuverable but not certain if it’s significantly less maneuverable.
"It's always in the last place I looked"
I think we're seeing the first few guesses for where the car might be, but according to the author, there was a 40km distance between the cabin and the girlfriend's town.
Hindsight is 20/20, but I wouldn't put it past the author to commit beyond 3 search sites, some of which may require deeper and larger bodies of water (like the second investigation did).
and, what perseverance; it really did read like a detective story and what a good job distilling the cases down to their basics.
what a cool read and an absolute triumph of an accomplishment.
still a massive accomplishment imo!
Had to get to PART 6 to answer my first question: What is an "ROV"?
"The solution was to use an ROV, Remote Operated Vehicle "
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standards_of_Learning
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/shit_out_of_luck
Your argument is that lots of experts on remotely operated vehicles would scoff at the article because it didn't use their "inside" jargon? First off, how many people would that be, compared to the number of people who love a good mystery and a good gadget, but have no idea what an ROV is?
As to bandwidth, you only have to spell it out once. Simple practice: I built a remotely-operated vehicle (ROV) and solved some cold missing person cases.
The author of this piece doesn't strike me as someone who relishes communicating in cryptic acronyms, so my guess is that it was just thoughtless. He hadn't yet seen my screed on the subject. :-)
I'm sure there are those who love communicating in cryptic code. They tend to congregate in like-minded cliques that don't much care about communicating outside their tightly-defined world. So be it. But if you want to be read and understood by a wide audience, spell it out.
The proper comparison isn't the author's time versus the readers looking it up, but rather readers encountering a term for the first time having to look it up versus every other reader having to read overly verbose writing that reiterates basic definitions rather than getting to the novel points. If you're as interested in ROVs as you imply, well now you know for all of the other times you will read the term. If you're really expecting to never encounter the term again, I wonder why you're reading a technical engineering-adjacent forum.
And yes, effective communication within "like-minded cliques" is exactly what is facilitated by jargon. Personally I'd rather read concise technical descriptions from such direct communications (doing the work to learn what I don't know from context or external sources), rather than having to skim through watered-down general-audience "edutainment" articles and read between the lines to figure out the specific touchstones being referenced by canned general phrases.
This isn't a water hobbyists forum, nor one for all manner of remotely operated vehicles, so it's a bit optimistic to assume many people here will know "ROV" as a remote controlled submarine. Fact is, most of us cannot, from the title, figure out if we're interested, nor from skimming the first six (!) pages of a long article. Explaining ROV once at the beginning would, I dare say, not have impacted the enjoyment of underwater professionals very much, but saved me and most others on this forum some time figuring out if I want to figure it out.
And the article was not written to this forum?
> Fact is, most of us cannot, from the title, figure out if we're interested
This is a situation where HN’s “no editorialising titles” rule falls flat. Simply with the context change the title would be also best changed. I also understand why we have the rule of course.
> Explaining ROV once at the beginning would, I dare say, not have impacted the enjoyment of underwater professionals very much
Sure. There is a lot which could have been improved on the whole article with better editing.
EDIT: also https://gist.github.com/klaaspieter/12cd68f54bb71a3940eae5cd...
For the latter, check this long list of acronyms used in Telsa vehicles (yes, A/C is obvious....keep scrolling down): https://service.tesla.com/docs/Model3/ServiceManual/2024/en-...
What the fluff is a "Brick Monitor Board"? I'm a car nut and I know a lot about EVs, and my best guess: it's a submodule of the battery management system that monitors a group of cells, which I think the only reason I know to guess that is because I've watched youtube videos of tesla packs being repaired or torn down. IBST? Turns out that's the vacuum pump for the brake servo, and "I" means "electronic."
For the former, he was probably ranting about this because he's always struck me as a little insecure about being better than NASA (not really that hard) and thus is annoyed by NASA's fetish for backronyms...which I think it inherited from the military due to sleeping in the same bed for three quarters of a century, but also their convenience.
During all phases of a mission, there are often times where comms need to be fast (for example, when the flight director or whoever does it, asks each subsystem person if they're go for launch - there's a lot of those subsystem people and the "are you OK with us proceeding" happens multiple times just during the lead-up to launch. It's a lot faster to have the following conversation:
"ECS?" "Go." "TACNAZ?" "Go." "DONUT?" "Go."
If you're the astronaut, you don't want to be shouting "Electronic Cookie Stabilizer failure!" over the radio during an emergency, and anyone on the channel with you probably knows every acronym relating to the mission by heart..
I don't understand how suicide isn't at the top of the list here. He was obviously very upset emotionally. He didn't care for his belongs other than his phone. He didn't care to steal someone's car or answer for it. He never shows up anywhere.
Everyone has watched a TV show where a case is slowly being solved, but who actually considers that oh yeah, I could actually become the person who searches for a random missing person case, instead of watching it on Netflix?
And the amount of McGyvering involved! How many people would have given up at one of the steps? Oh it requires coding in C++ for Arduino, sure, I'll just do that. Oh, it requires me to contact manufacturers to manufacture something, which I have never done, and I don't even know how to use a 3D modeling program. Sure, I'll just learn how to do that and then actually have it made. Pretty sure the give-up rate there would be very high!
If this were TV, people would hardly consider it plausible. And they did it, for real. And all out of just pure curiosity!
(Netflix employees have to pitch stories via agents, just like any “nobody” would, FWIW.)
r/rov: https://www.reddit.com/r/rov/
Bioradiolocation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioradiolocation
FMCW: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous-wave_radar
mmWave (60 Ghz) can do heartbeat detection above water FWIU. As can WiFi.
mmwave (millimeter wave), UWA (Underwater Acoustic)
Citations of "Analysis and estimation of the underwater acoustic millimeter-wave communication channel" (2016) https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=8297460493079369585...
Citations of "Wi-Fi signal analysis for heartbeat and metal detection: a comparative study of reliable contactless systems" https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=3926358377223165726...
/? does WiFi work underwater? https://www.google.com/search?q=does+wifi+work+underwater
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=1308760257416493671... ... "Environment-independent textile fiber identification using Wi-Fi channel state information", "Measurement of construction materials properties using Wi-Fi and convolutional neural networks"
"Underwater target detection by measuring water-surface vibration with millimeter-wave radar" https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=1710768155624387794... :
> UWSN (Underwater Sensor Network)
I'm reminded of Baywatch S09E01; but those aren't actual trained lifeguards. The film Armageddon works as a training film because of all of the [safety,] mistakes: https://www.google.com/search?q=baywatch+s09e01
Most of us only wish we could tell stories like that as a result of the technical work we do.
I’ve spread myself so thin over the years that I find it hard to get excited about things.
If this is your mission, don’t quit. Do it. Second chances are consolation prizes, and a noble cause may only present once.