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Ha ha!! They have reinvented the Iowa farm boy! Only slightly kidding. I learned at a young age the sounds of unhappy machines. This skill has served me well i

Ha ha!! They have reinvented the Iowa farm boy! Only slightly kidding. I learned at a young age the sounds of unhappy machines. This skill has served me well in my engineering career. The "townies" with degrees from fancier schools than mine are often much slower on reaching for e-stop. This project has huge economic value. Done right it is a game changer.

anigbrowl 10y ago
Same here, though I am not that enthused at the rush to get machines to do it rather than passing skills on to people. I don't see what all the formerly-employed people are going to do as their skillsets are automated away.
- apathy 10y ago
  1) Iowa Farm Boys can, you know, farm things 2) We're going to have to figure this out as a society unless we like the idea of Mad Max: Interstate 80. The incoming administration may or may not be ideal for the moment in time which we find ourselves :-/ but eventually this comes to a breaking point. Doctors and lawyers listen to things for money, too...
  - fleitz 10y ago
    Perhaps Iowa Farm Boys are also good at picking administrations from the sounds they make.
blacksmith_tb 10y ago
I wonder though about getting enough training data - electric motors fail fairly rarely - MTBF would often be in the tens of thousands of hours (or better), I'd expect. Though possibly a hybrid approach where you record the sound of any motor that has a service call could work, I suppose. IC engines fail quite a bit faster, so that shouldn't be as hard.
- sigstoat 10y ago
  after a few tens of thousands of hours of data, i'd say any behavior which isn't present in the preceding 10k hours is a bad sign.
  - dbcurtis 10y ago
    That's what I'm thinking. Don't even bother to factory train the AI. Just let it learn what the machine sounds like new. After a few weeks of training data, any deviation is suspicious.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
electromagnetic 10y ago
My dad was gifted with cars, and got into programming with fuel injectors back in the day. He worked as a diagnostic mechanic for a lot of years with lots of funny stories (like roping himself to a car roof with the hood taken off), but he'll sit in your car and tell you a wheel bearing is going. Jump him around the seats and he'll isolate it for you, and even today he gets it on the margin before a dealerships mechanic would be able to spot it. IIRC a 747 produces 30TB of data per hour from its engine monitoring. It won't be long until it's in all cars, and then in expensive appliances. A washing machine that detects an unbalanced load to save the motor? It definitely is a game changer, and I don't think we'll fully comprehend the economic value. Say a stove that can detect a pizza box smoldering on it and cut its own power. What's the economic value of saving a house from burning down? From saving a washing machine from self destructing, or a front loader from flooding your house because a flow monitor says it put more water in than should have triggered the float valve, etc. It's not just industrial that will benefit, it'll be everything we put moving parts in.
- DougN7 10y ago
  That would be wonderful and I hope you're right. However, most manufacturer don't benefit if you but a new washing machine every 30 years instead of every 10.
  - sumoboy 10y ago
    Unless it's a Samsung where lifetime < 5 years and self destructs.

anigbrowl 10y ago

Same here, though I am not that enthused at the rush to get machines to do it rather than passing skills on to people. I don't see what all the formerly-employed people are going to do as their skillsets are automated away.

apathy 10y ago
1) Iowa Farm Boys can, you know, farm things 2) We're going to have to figure this out as a society unless we like the idea of Mad Max: Interstate 80. The incoming administration may or may not be ideal for the moment in time which we find ourselves :-/ but eventually this comes to a breaking point. Doctors and lawyers listen to things for money, too...
- fleitz 10y ago
  Perhaps Iowa Farm Boys are also good at picking administrations from the sounds they make.

blacksmith_tb 10y ago

I wonder though about getting enough training data - electric motors fail fairly rarely - MTBF would often be in the tens of thousands of hours (or better), I'd expect. Though possibly a hybrid approach where you record the sound of any motor that has a service call could work, I suppose. IC engines fail quite a bit faster, so that shouldn't be as hard.

sigstoat 10y ago
after a few tens of thousands of hours of data, i'd say any behavior which isn't present in the preceding 10k hours is a bad sign.
- dbcurtis 10y ago
  That's what I'm thinking. Don't even bother to factory train the AI. Just let it learn what the machine sounds like new. After a few weeks of training data, any deviation is suspicious.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]

electromagnetic 10y ago

My dad was gifted with cars, and got into programming with fuel injectors back in the day. He worked as a diagnostic mechanic for a lot of years with lots of funny stories (like roping himself to a car roof with the hood taken off), but he'll sit in your car and tell you a wheel bearing is going. Jump him around the seats and he'll isolate it for you, and even today he gets it on the margin before a dealerships mechanic would be able to spot it. IIRC a 747 produces 30TB of data per hour from its engine monitoring. It won't be long until it's in all cars, and then in expensive appliances. A washing machine that detects an unbalanced load to save the motor? It definitely is a game changer, and I don't think we'll fully comprehend the economic value. Say a stove that can detect a pizza box smoldering on it and cut its own power. What's the economic value of saving a house from burning down? From saving a washing machine from self destructing, or a front loader from flooding your house because a flow monitor says it put more water in than should have triggered the float valve, etc. It's not just industrial that will benefit, it'll be everything we put moving parts in.

DougN7 10y ago
That would be wonderful and I hope you're right. However, most manufacturer don't benefit if you but a new washing machine every 30 years instead of every 10.
- sumoboy 10y ago
  Unless it's a Samsung where lifetime < 5 years and self destructs.