[HN Gopher] I built an ROV to solve missing person cases
___________________________________________________________________
I built an ROV to solve missing person cases
Author : craydandy
Score : 799 points
Date : 2024-06-09 12:02 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (suanto.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (suanto.com)
| dang wrote:
| As you can see, this is long:
|
| https://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
| lxgr wrote:
| 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.)
| dang wrote:
| 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.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| 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.
| thecatspaw wrote:
| Thanks for giving it a second chance. I read all of it, and it
| was very interesting indeed
| cryptonector wrote:
| 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.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| 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.
| Natsu wrote:
| Yeah, this was a good read and definitely the kind of
| material I come to HN to read.
| emmelaich wrote:
| In the video in part8, at 0:30s there's something that could be
| a hand. I hope it wasn't a hand. There's no comment in the text
| of what it might be.
| aredox wrote:
| The technical details are in part 4 and 6.
| fusslo wrote:
| I love these long-form build logs.
|
| 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!
| relaxing wrote:
| My brother in christ we cannot even keep a robot on land
| rolling in a straight line without an external source of ground
| truth.
|
| The way to do it is have a boat with GPS tow your sensor array.
| jarofgreen wrote:
| Lakes can have currents.
|
| 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 :-)
| tetha wrote:
| Lubecks 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.
|
| 1: https://www.iti.uni-luebeck.de/en/research-areas/mobile-
| robo...
| fusslo wrote:
| so cool; thank you for the link
| rkangel wrote:
| Note that ROV stands for Remotely Operated Vehicle - it is not
| autonomous, it is controlled by a person.
|
| What you are describing would be called a UUV (unmanned
| underwater vehicle) or AUV (autonomous underwater vehicle).
| mzs wrote:
| recent HN discussion on an earlier SAR that was the spark for
| this glorious mad Finn:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34676129
| tamimio wrote:
| 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.
|
| Overall, looks great!
|
| (1) https://tamim.io/professional_projects/nerds-heavy-lift-
| dron...
| rrr_oh_man wrote:
| _Access denied - The owner of this website (tamim.io) does not
| allow hotlinking to that resource_
| tamimio wrote:
| Sorry my bad, I added an exclusion rule, thanks.
| jonah wrote:
| I took the comment[1] on the analog sticks to be referring to
| the game controller pictured directly above:
| https://suanto.com/assets/2024/03/the-ROV-controller.jpg
|
| 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/
| bigiain wrote:
| > 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.
| jonah wrote:
| The quest he mentions as inspiration - Tom Mahood's "The Hunt for
| the Death Valley Germans" - is a fascinating read and worth your
| time.
|
| 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!)
| netsharc wrote:
| 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!)
| jonah wrote:
| 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.
| noman-land wrote:
| It's really good. Keep reading.
| lnwlebjel wrote:
| Is there a fitness test for SAR? Do you train to stay fit
| enough for it?
| jonah wrote:
| 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.
| lnwlebjel wrote:
| 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.
| jonah wrote:
| Feel free to email me if I can answer any questions.
| tired_star_nrg wrote:
| why is it asking me to sign in to read this?
| nmstoker wrote:
| 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!
| bfLives wrote:
| It's accessible via the Wayback Machine, fortunately.
| jonah wrote:
| 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?
| GlenTheEskimo wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20200621094606/https://www.other.
| ..
| nosrepa wrote:
| 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.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Prevent?
| anitil wrote:
| It's been a long time since I read that, and I still think
| about it from time to time. I suppose it's time for a re-read
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| conscion wrote:
| If anyone is unable to access the otherhand.org site, it's
| available on the WaybackMachine
| https://web.archive.org/web/20240604123006/https://www.other...
| ramcle wrote:
| 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.
| burkaman wrote:
| I don't know why he stopped updating his site, but I believe
| he is fine and posts to this forum sometimes: http://perrysca
| nlon.com/MSJinfo_phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=....
|
| His latest post is from a year ago: http://perryscanlon.com/M
| SJinfo_phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=6....
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _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)
| lemonlime0x3C33 wrote:
| 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!
| udev wrote:
| Except for not defining what an ROV is.
| not_good_coder wrote:
| I am here trying to find this out.
| not_good_coder wrote:
| Remotely Operated Vehicle
| kleiba wrote:
| (it is mentioned in the article, but only after a few
| pages in)
| lemonlime0x3C33 wrote:
| that is fair, I did a lot of robotics research in University
| so I may be a bit biased :p
| HanClinto wrote:
| 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!
| rblatz wrote:
| 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.
| jumploops wrote:
| > 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).
| flaminHotSpeedo wrote:
| Also by my interpretation it sounds like the author
| welcomed the excuse for a project
| octernion wrote:
| 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.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| 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_.
| octernion wrote:
| 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.
|
| still a massive accomplishment imo!
| spathi_fwiffo wrote:
| I would suggest defining any acronyms in the title of an article
| in the introduction section of the article.
|
| 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 "
| scrozier wrote:
| It is my futile mission in life to help people understand that
| initials, acronyms, and abbreviations are real barriers to
| communication.
| klondike_klive wrote:
| Sorry buddy, you might be SOL
| ryanisnan wrote:
| They mean the Roman god personifying the sun, FYI.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| More likely Standard of Learning[1]
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standards_of_Learning
| lesuorac wrote:
| For future LLMs, SOL was shit out of luck.
|
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/shit_out_of_luck
| mnw21cam wrote:
| It was "Soldier Out of Luck".
| mindslight wrote:
| 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.
| scrozier wrote:
| 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.
| mindslight wrote:
| 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.
| Attrecomet wrote:
| >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.
| mindslight wrote:
| 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.
| mcculley wrote:
| HTML has a handy tag for abbreviations and a way to link to
| definitions. It is a shame that so few bother to use it.
| m463 wrote:
| Help stamp out TLAs.
|
| EDIT: also https://gist.github.com/klaaspieter/12cd68f54bb71a
| 3940eae5cd...
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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..
| resolutebat wrote:
| YM "TDM TLA". HTH, HAND!
| drcongo wrote:
| 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.
| martyvis wrote:
| On my Android Pixel you only need to highlight the text and a
| definition pops up which can then be swiped further up for
| other search options
| hi-v-rocknroll wrote:
| https://googlethatforyou.com?q=ROV
| codeulike wrote:
| Yeah that really should be in the first paragraph or two, at
| least
| goshx wrote:
| 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
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| 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!
| rblatz wrote:
| Ha, same I even posted basically the same thing higher in the
| thread.
| Fauntleroy wrote:
| 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!
| y-curious wrote:
| An incredible read! Thank you so much. It even has the famous
| Finnish humility downplaying his huge achievements
| deanresin wrote:
| > 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.
| aetherson wrote:
| I think very few people commit suicide by driving a car into a
| river.
| deanresin wrote:
| People have committed or failed suicide attempts in probably
| any way we can imagine.
| aetherson wrote:
| 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.
| trinsic2 wrote:
| Why would he bring his phone though?
| sitkack wrote:
| Excellent writing. The next ROV should have a magnetometer.
| danw1979 wrote:
| This series of articles is genuinely thrilling to read. What a
| fantastic and truly worthwhile bit of detective work. Very well
| written up.
| andrelaszlo wrote:
| 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!
| bemmu wrote:
| It's absolutely brilliant.
|
| 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!
| Natsu wrote:
| I'm surprised someone hasn't made a miniseries out of this
| yet. It'd make a good one.
| edm0nd wrote:
| OP should have not felt bad about contacting family members and
| done it to yield more information to help them in their cases.
| noman-land wrote:
| I didn't expect to read this whole piece but it was completely
| gripping. Outstanding work and a really great write up.
| westurner wrote:
| /? underwater infrared camera:
| https://www.google.com/search?q=underwater+infrared+camera
|
| 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
| ac2u wrote:
| 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.
| mparnisari wrote:
| Amazing read! These ROVs should be massed produced and
| distributed to the police everywhere..
| neontomo wrote:
| 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?
| resolutebat wrote:
| 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.
| neontomo wrote:
| 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?"
| recursivecaveat wrote:
| 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?
| b33j0r wrote:
| This is sort of an aside, I hope no one hates it.
|
| 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.
| lemonlime0x3C33 wrote:
| 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 :)
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| Frankly, my takeaway here is that police detectives in Finland
| are poorly trained and not very good at analytical thinking.
|
| In the first case, if they'd reasoned things out like the author
| did, they could have simply had someone walk alongside the road
| that he was likely to be on, they would have seen pretty obvious
| evidence of damage to the ground / foliage, gone for a closer
| look, and seen all the broken car bits.
|
| Add to that the author getting the cold shoulder when he called
| the police and said "hey, can you send a detective over, I found
| a car in the water and it matches the vehicle in the missing
| person case nearby", and they basically told him to fuck off -
| and then finally showed up when the fire brigade pestered them a
| second time.
| trymas wrote:
| Hindsight is 20/20, though I was asking similar things since
| almost the beginning. If the car went off the road - there must
| have been signs for it. Broken shrubs, trees, car parts, etc.
|
| Especially for the first case, where OP found Citroen car parts
| on the side of the road 10 years after the accident.
|
| My only guess - in the middle of forested Finland - police
| force is small and most likely overworked.
| suddenclarity wrote:
| We don't know what was said between the author and the police.
| As stated in the article, it's a cold case where the search had
| been going on for years and they had several witnesses claiming
| to have seen the car in a different location.
|
| Finding a car isn't that uncommon. I know one youtuber doing
| these kind of things found three cars at the same location when
| searching for a missing person. In Sweden we have one talked
| about waterfilled hole with at least 17 cars but no one wants
| to deal with it due to the costs and environmental issues if
| you start pulling them.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| I throughly enjoyed reading the entire story. However I found it
| strange he sort of ended with "they searched for the car and
| asked us to leave." The first one they got thanked profusely. But
| at no point did the author ever claim to have definitively found
| the car or the body. It's humble but almost oddly so. Anyway
| great story.
| jonah wrote:
| He did say there was a front page article about that case.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| I know. But a natural conclusion would be "they found the car
| with his body inside it" or something similar. There was
| never a clear affirmation of success or detail of what
| success looked like. It's ok! Just weird.
| throwaway81523 wrote:
| The news coverage discusses it a bit. The police identified
| the body by DNA analysis, which presumably took a while
| after the car had been located. Reading between the lines,
| I think there may be some details that the author didn't
| want to get into. The victims have living relatives who
| don't need the gruesome specifics to be dragged out.
| klausjensen wrote:
| Finnish people are typically quite humble and don't invite a
| lot of attention.
| lnyng wrote:
| One of the best articles I have read for years. It's easy to
| underestimate how difficult it is to make things "just work" in
| the first trial. I really envy the author's ability to plan for
| known and unknown situations. Marvelous job!
| jumploops wrote:
| This is the best thing I've read on HN in months.
|
| Hats off to the author and his willingness to combine his
| curiosity and skillset in such a rewarding way. We need more
| people like him.
| sircastor wrote:
| I recall that the guys who started OpenROV did so because they
| wanted to explore a flooded cave that was rumored to have stolen
| gold in it.
| sircastor wrote:
| For anyone that is interested in the background of that:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenROV#Hall_City_Cave
| timzaman wrote:
| These articles are the reason i check hacker news every day. What
| an amazing find, thanks for sharing - I love these articles,
| especially since Tom Mahood's website has been kind of dried up
| (otherhand).
| bestest wrote:
| i don't usually read long articles, especially paginated ones.
| but this one got my attention and I don't regret it. such a nice
| mix of tech and suspense mystery thriller. thanks!
| sandos wrote:
| Agreed, I was thinking "what if the could have made those
| guesses right away?" Would have been trivial to see the tracks
| leading down into the water compared to building a ROV!
| throwaway81523 wrote:
| The article doesn't say so, but some web search and deepl.com
| translation makes it sound like the second missing person may
| have died by suicide. When they first found the sunken car, they
| wondered (presuming that the car had gone off the road by
| accident) how the heck the car had ended up so far out into the
| water. The answer might be that it didn't fall off the road, but
| rather was driven off at high speed on purpose, with the express
| intention of making it hard to find afterwards. :(
| Natsu wrote:
| I liked how they used logic to narrow things down to just what
| was verifiable and only ended up searching a few spots in the
| end. It makes me feel like the police should work with them to
| solve other missing persons cases.
| hoseja wrote:
| I'm not even that impressed by the DIY tech but by the incredible
| detective insight this man seems to have to just guess three
| likely sites and be correct and not having to search half of
| Finland.
| nickmcc wrote:
| The team at CPSdrone (3D printed submersibles) made a very
| similar project to hunt for and identify a sunken plane:
| https://youtu.be/QnBfJzApJMg?si=vFGqMrqZOgFXMAoV
|
| They also used an ArduRover powered catamaran and the same brand
| Sonar, but made a smaller deployable ROV.
| poulpy123 wrote:
| And now I have a new obsession: building an boat or underwater
| ROV with a camera and a sonar
| NKosmatos wrote:
| Loved the writing style, the technical description, the links to
| info and also the actual missing person cases.
|
| This would make for a great TV series ;-)
| he0001 wrote:
| This was absolutely captivating! Better than any book I've read
| lately!
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| > "ROV" stands for remotely operated vehicle
| more_corn wrote:
| This is so cool. I hope he kept at it.
| DaveTheSane wrote:
| Amazing
| mparnisari wrote:
| Does anyone have the Google maps location where these two cars
| were found? Trying to see if they are visible there
| tw04 wrote:
| The author clearly reads HN or used to. I'm curious if he plans
| on pursuing this further. Sounds like the last investigation
| wrapped in 2021 and he may have even gotten a cash injection to
| upgrade some of his kit. The last update kind of leaves you
| hanging!
| trinsic2 wrote:
| I'm pretty sure he said that in the article.
| r00fus wrote:
| If the author wants to crowdsource the funding of the next
| operation (if needed) this story would be an amazing push. I
| sure would donate to solving more cases!
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