I keep seeing people make a big deal out of the “game controller”. Bomb squads, military drone operators, and others use these because they work as a simple input device.
They are cheap and effective and not any different than a computer mouse. I am surprised the military does not pay $1000 for the same thing labeled as “mil-spec”.
Just my .02
There is a lot of speculation and a laundry list of things that could have gone wrong and they had a history of many problems ending dives to include the batteries. From what I can tell, the game controller was probably one of the most reliable things on the vessel.
#25 My usb mouse would get sticky or stop working until I found a buried setting in Device Manager. The bluetooth mouse I tried as a replacement would not stay connected reliably.
These are items made by the millions in use with Windows software and they still fail.
I bet he saw that wireless device and thought it would be cool to use it on his homemade sub.