Todays blue sky

[N. Thornton]

Todays blue sky
---------------


Todays blue sky is a machine that will save its owners a fortune.
Large organisations such as councils, hotel chains, and many others
buy large quantities of electronic equipment: with a suitable machine
much of this expenditure could be avoided.

New goods are so cheap because they are made by machines, used goods
are so costly to repair because they are repaired by hand, slowly and
expensively. The central idea here is to change that, and develop a
repair machine that can churn out repaired goods at speed and in
quantity, with only one human operator.

It would take the best of the following faulty goods:

microwaves
driers
stereos and radios
TVs
videos
washing machines
hoovers (vacuum cleaners to the Americans)

and apply a fast mechanised and automated repair process to them.


As well as junk and low value items, tips and dumps also have a
regular supply of modern non-working goods in othewise good condition.
For example Dyson vacs now turn up regularly at dumps, along with many
items just out of guarantee. Many retail chains also offer to take
customers' old goods away. A lot of quality material is buried along
with the junk simply because repair is too costly.

This machine gets round the problem of repair cost in 2 ways. Firstly
it drastically reduces labour costs.

Secondly it almost completely eliminates parts costs. It logs all
items it checks, and decides what to do with the items it does not
repair. Most it dumps in the scrap bin, but it will select some to
keep in a parts pile, the size of which is determined by the operator.
After the first week it will thus supply itself with parts for
repairs. Only low value items that must be new are bought, things like
hoover bags for example.



So how would this machine work?
-------------------------------


This is what it would need to do with each item:

1. pick the item up and position it for testing
2. identify the item, by make, model no, etc
3. when it cant do that it would test it to see what it does, using
the item's external connectors, and narrowing the options down by
optical word recognition.
4. test it to see how it works and whats wrong
5. remove covers when necessary
6. either recall specific circuit information or use general purpose
fault analysis approaches.
7. apply the necessary tests to work out what the problem part is
8. work out how to fix it
9. either label the item saying which component to replace, and which
dead machine to source it from, and place it in the repair pile, cover
ready removed, with donor machine next to it.
10. Or decide that its not worth repairing, and drop it in the scrap
bin
11. Or ditto but put it in the parts pile
12. pick up and function and safety test the item after repair.
13. Fully stock control the repaired items.


It would pick the items up itself, and run its processes on item after
item, churning out a stream of goods labelled with how to repair them
in less than say 20 minutes, with only the easy repairs being chosen.

The following goods would be rejected:
not of sufficient value
takes too long to repair
spare parts needed that arent immediately accessible onsite free
any goods the company already has too many of

The machine will maintain a folder of choice related data which helps
it intelligently assess which goods to repair. This folder will
contain information for example on which items the company has no
interest in, any it particularly needs, any specific models with known
problems, make or model preferences, and any other issues that affect
which goods it should select for repairs.


Basically this (imaginary) machine takes a slow manual repair process
and turns it into a conveyor belt operation with high output per
person, more like a factory.



A factory makes one item on a line, and thus uses simple machines
specific to that task. This repair machine must cover a range of goods
and a range of models, and test and diagnose faults, making it need to
be much more complex. On the other hand it is dealing with goods that
have already been almost completely manufactured: they will need only
one item replacing. All the rest of the manufacture has been done
already. Not only that but the materials it works with are much
cheaper than a factory's, because they are simply scrap rather than a
selection of new designed and made to order parts. Thus this machine
has cost advantages over a factory as well as its own
complexity/expense downside.


I think this is the way forward. It is probably more a question of
when these machines will come into use rather than whether.



Can we do it now?
-----------------


I think the answer is yes, that we already have all the technology we
need to develop such a machine. Lets look at each step of the process
and see what we have.


1. pick the item up and position it for testing
- this is straightforward with robot arms and video shape recognition.

2. identify the item, by make, model no, etc
- cameras, optical character recognition and a database are all well
within todays technology

3. when it cant do that it would test it to see what it does, using
the item's external connectors, narrowing the options down first by
optical word recognition.
- it is not difficult to use meters, sig gen, scope etc, and apply
power to mains type connectors or leads. Text recognition would
greatly speed things up by identifying keywords like volume, tuning,
cassette, spin, bio-profile, 40C, and so on.

4. test it to see how it works and whats wrong
- once intended functions have been identified it can run a test
routine to see what the item does. Robot arms can operate the
controls. It could even apply a series of thumps to check for any poor
connections.

5. remove covers when necessary
- in most cases fairly straightforward using robot arms, with a
machine with all the necessary tools. How to open this case also needs
to be covered, which I expect could be done, and a general plan of
attack routine might be worth adding for any items it cant work out.

6. either recall specific circuit information or use general purpose
fault analysis approaches.
- such approaches are well known

7. apply the necessary tests to work out what the problem part is
- this often requires probing internal parts. Video would need to be
able to recognise some of the key parts, the more it could recognise
the more tests it could run. Object recognition is a known science.
It wont need to get it right 100% of the time, but the more tests it
can correctly apply the more items it can repair. Electrical probes
can be applied using todays robot arm technology, with some
electronics to detect when it contacts.

8. work out how to fix it
- these techniques are well known. If the part rcognition is good it
should be possible to do this with a good success rate.

9. either label the item saying which component to replace, and which
dead machine to source it from, and place it in the repair pile, cover
ready removed, with donor machine next to it.
10. Or decide that its not worth repairing, and drop it in the scrap
bin
11. Or ditto but put it in the parts pile
- these 3 are simple.

12. function and safety test the item after repair.
- all known technology.

13. Fully stock control the repaired items.
- EPOS and order systems are well established already


All these methods can be done today.



Is it worth it?
---------------


The value of such equipment would be considerable. Rather than use it
to repair scrapped goods and sell them second hand, it would be of
greater value if it is used instead to supply a stream of goods to
organisations that are currently buying new, because the goods
produced wipe out the new goods purchase costs, rather than only
achieving used goods prices less all the costs involved in selling.

Once such kit is developed it could output a stream of items every
day. The development cost is quite substantial, but its use is also
very large, not just for the first machine itslf, but the whole genre
of repair machines that will follow. Is it worth it? You tell me.


Thats my thought for the morning, I've left plenty of debateables in
there. What do you think?


Regards, NT

 

[henryf]

Sounds great! Perhaps you could enlarge the concept to repair
old cars? Let me know as soon as you get the prototype working.

 

[Dr. A.T. Squeegee]

Thats my thought for the morning, I've left plenty of debateables in
there. What do you think?

I think you should re-adjust your tinfoil hat, and get back on
your meds.

*PLONK!*

--
Dr. Anton Squeegee, Director, Dutch Surrealist Plumbing Institute
(Known to some as Bruce Lane, KC7GR)
kyrrin a/t bluefeathertech d-o=t c&o&m
Motorola Radio Programming & Service Available -
http://www.bluefeathertech.com/rf.html
"Quando Omni Flunkus Moritati" (Red Green)

 

[John Popelish]

Todays blue sky
--------------- (snip)
Is it worth it?
---------------

The value of such equipment would be considerable. Rather than use it
to repair scrapped goods and sell them second hand, it would be of
greater value if it is used instead to supply a stream of goods to
organisations that are currently buying new, because the goods
produced wipe out the new goods purchase costs, rather than only
achieving used goods prices less all the costs involved in selling.

Once such kit is developed it could output a stream of items every
day. The development cost is quite substantial, but its use is also
very large, not just for the first machine itslf, but the whole genre
of repair machines that will follow. Is it worth it? You tell me.

Thats my thought for the morning, I've left plenty of debateables in
there. What do you think?

Unfortunately, evolution (which eventually tries just about
everything) has shown that making new beings is more cost effective
than repairing old ones, after some point. This is a problem of
arbitrary complexity, since designs keep changing (both in products
and living things). I think the best solution is similar to what life
does. Break old units back down to some common denominator bits
(large molecules at best) and assemble new units from these bits. We
don't yet design new products with this process much in mind. But
eventually, we will, I think.

 

[Ian Stirling]

Unfortunately, evolution (which eventually tries just about
everything) has shown that making new beings is more cost effective
than repairing old ones, after some point. This is a problem of

Not very relevant.
Evolution does not care about the longevity of the individual, after
reproduction.

 

[John Larkin]

Not very relevant.
Evolution does not care about the longevity of the individual, after
reproduction.

Of course it does. If we were just to breed and die, who would pay our
brats' college tuition? Not to mention wedding expenses.

John

 

[Paul Burridge]

Thats my thought for the morning, I've left plenty of debateables in
there. What do you think?

You're nuts. But I've got some very nice plutonium nitride Hi-Fi
speaker cable going cheap if you're interested...

 

[Paul Burridge]

Not very relevant.
Evolution does not care about the longevity of the individual, after
reproduction.

Depends on the species. Human offspring have a uniquely necessarily
long nurture period compared to all other animals so evolution has to
"care" about the parents surviving for several years after breeding.

 

[N. Thornton]

:

Unfortunately, evolution (which eventually tries just about
everything) has shown that making new beings is more cost effective
than repairing old ones, after some point. This is a problem of
arbitrary complexity, since designs keep changing (both in products
and living things). I think the best solution is similar to what life
does. Break old units back down to some common denominator bits
(large molecules at best) and assemble new units from these bits. We
don't yet design new products with this process much in mind. But
eventually, we will, I think.

I get the feeling that you might have missed something, unless I've
misunderstood your point. Ie that this machine would repair the recent
goods, items still as good as new ones, and not the obsolescing stuff,
which would be scrapped. There is no shortage of such recent kit
available.


Regards, NT

 

[John Popelish]

Not very relevant.
Evolution does not care about the longevity of the individual, after
reproduction.

Nor do most manufacturers of commercial products. They are generally
worried that they will last too long.

 

[John Popelish]

I get the feeling that you might have missed something, unless I've
misunderstood your point. Ie that this machine would repair the recent
goods, items still as good as new ones, and not the obsolescing stuff,
which would be scrapped. There is no shortage of such recent kit
available.

I think I understand what you are proposing. I am seeing this as an
entropy problem. Keeping the robot up to date on the entire array of
product details and making decisions about what to keep and repair,
and how that can be done versus what to discard is not a trivial
task. That decision will end up costing more than the repairs,
eventually.

At work, I am regularly asked to fix things that are eminently and
cheaply fixable if only all the relevant info were available.
Sometimes a 50 cent part can save 10s of thousands of dollars. But
lacking that info, my cost of researching or reverse engineering the
information would often end up costing way more than the device is
worth. Occasionally I perform real heroics to get some essentially
unreplacable device back in service, and it has earned me a reputation
of something of a miracle worker. But I hate to think of the money
spent on some of these efforts.

How will you encourage every manufacturer to provide the vast library
of technical details needed to make reasonable decisions about discard
or repair, when they have every interest in keeping secrets to
encourage consumption of new production? Then you have to figure out
how to educate the robot to digest those details.

 

[Don A. Gilmore]

I design machines for a living and I see a few flaws in your idea.

You're forgetting that machines are very expensive. The only way to justify
the capital expense of even the simplest automatic machine is if it is kept
busy. This means it must process thousands, or even millions, of parts or
devices per year to make it worthwhile. Most machines in industry perform
simple, repetitive operations. They must be situated along a conveyor, with
the part located exactly, to do their designated task, or must be easily
loaded and unloaded by a human operator who positions the work precisely in
a custom-made fixture. Some assembly machines can accept parts that have
been simply poured into large hoppers, sorting them and properly assembling
them, but only on a relatively simple level.

Could you really have a constant enough supply of defective devices to keep
such a machine busy enough to pay for itself, let alone make a profit? And
if you had that many defective parts, isn't there something wrong? Would
each machine be dedicated to only repair one flaw? And who finds the flaw
and routs the product to the proper machine? Do you realize what it would
cost to design and build a machine that could actually do all the things you
mention, if it's even possible at all? And what happens when you update the
product, or improve it, or obsolete it and replace it with something better?
Is this product the only one sold by the company? If not, do you need one
of these "repair machines" for each product? I'd think an ordinary repair
technician would be much cheaper.

If you think a machine can actually be built that intelligently picks up a
product, takes it apart, inspects it, troubleshoots it, discovers the
problem and determines a solution, fixes it and then puts it all back
together again, then you've been watching too much science fiction, or
reading Popular Mechanics. This would be a sophisticated system indeed. It
would practically be a human being! Even fairly simple machines can cost
hundreds of thousands of dollars...this one would easily cost millions. I
desinged a million-dollar machine once and it just makes brake levers for
automobiles.

Don't get me wrong. If you actually have detailed plans for such a machine
and can get someone to make it happen, then good luck. But you can't just
throw out a raw idea and expect someone to design it, finance it and build
it for you while you sit back and collect fat checks.

And I mean actual, buildable plans, too, not just ideas. I can get out a
piece of paper and draw up a sketch of my "time machine" that shows a chair
and a big lever with "PAST" and "FUTURE" written above it, but I have to
come up with exactly *how* it works before it's a true invention.

 

[N. Thornton]

I think I understand what you are proposing. I am seeing this as an
entropy problem. Keeping the robot up to date on the entire array of
product details and making decisions about what to keep and repair,
and how that can be done versus what to discard is not a trivial
task.

Updating on product details is not needed. The robot will diagnose
goods with no circut diagram available by following as many as poss of
the same kind of procdures that any repair tech would follow when they
dont have the circuit diagram. Product details are just an extra, they
will result in a higher repair rate for that product, but they are not
needed.

Only the very occasional product update would be wanted, for when a
product comes out that works by a differing principle to what the
machine knows. An example might be when the VHF radio band came out:
you cant repair that using the same procedures you would for am.

Deciding what to repair, I'm unclear how thats such a tough task. Its
cal;culated from simple things like:
how long are we allowed to spend per washing machine, per tv, per...
do we have too many or too few of these
is this model average inferior or superior quality
how much inventory storage space do we have
do we have the parts in the scrap pile (machine decided)
and occasionally: is this item a special job, and if so how long can
we allocate to fix it?

That decision will end up costing more than the repairs,
eventually.

Could you explain?

At work, I am regularly asked to fix things that are eminently and
cheaply fixable if only all the relevant info were available.
Sometimes a 50 cent part can save 10s of thousands of dollars. But
lacking that info, my cost of researching or reverse engineering the
information would often end up costing way more than the device is
worth. Occasionally I perform real heroics to get some essentially
unreplacable device back in service, and it has earned me a reputation
of something of a miracle worker. But I hate to think of the money
spent on some of these efforts.

How will you encourage every manufacturer to provide the vast library
of technical details needed to make reasonable decisions about discard
or repair, when they have every interest in keeping secrets to
encourage consumption of new production?

This isnt needed. I thought this was explained.

Then you have to figure out
how to educate the robot to digest those details.

Not a problem since it isnt needed. But if you do want a team to
continue working on updating product databases (at considerable cost),
the team would design new action sequences to follow through and
probably deliver them to the machine over the net. Probably this would
only happen once per several years to keep the repair rate up as tech
changes.


Regards, NT

 

[Ken Taylor]

Updating on product details is not needed. The robot will diagnose
goods with no circut diagram available by following as many as poss of
the same kind of procdures that any repair tech would follow when they
dont have the circuit diagram. Product details are just an extra, they
will result in a higher repair rate for that product, but they are not
needed.

Only the very occasional product update would be wanted, for when a
product comes out that works by a differing principle to what the
machine knows. An example might be when the VHF radio band came out:
you cant repair that using the same procedures you would for am.

Deciding what to repair, I'm unclear how thats such a tough task. Its
cal;culated from simple things like:
how long are we allowed to spend per washing machine, per tv, per...
do we have too many or too few of these
is this model average inferior or superior quality
how much inventory storage space do we have
do we have the parts in the scrap pile (machine decided)
and occasionally: is this item a special job, and if so how long can
we allocate to fix it?


Could you explain?



This isnt needed. I thought this was explained.


Not a problem since it isnt needed. But if you do want a team to
continue working on updating product databases (at considerable cost),
the team would design new action sequences to follow through and
probably deliver them to the machine over the net. Probably this would
only happen once per several years to keep the repair rate up as tech
changes.


Regards, NT

Take the example of a modern DVD or CD player - what can you buy one for,
twenty bucks? Is the cost of even sending it to the repairer going to exceed
repair costs? And that's without the repairer being able to get enough money
back on the job to pay for the machine, whether you believe it's low cost or
not.

Ken

 

[N. Thornton]

Take the example of a modern DVD or CD player - what can you buy one for,
twenty bucks? Is the cost of even sending it to the repairer going to exceed
repair costs? And that's without the repairer being able to get enough money
back on the job to pay for the machine, whether you believe it's low cost or
not.

Ken

Perhaps thats why such items arent included on the list for this
hypothetical machine.

Regards, NT

 

[N. Thornton]

I design machines for a living and I see a few flaws in your idea.

Good, as there are substantial issues with it. But you dont seem to
have understood what the thing is yet. The outline is that it is one
machine that can diagnose faults in a wide array of items, not a suite
of product specific machines.

If I get more time I'll address more points. Please also see the post
title, I think you missed that.


Thanks, NT

 

[Ken Taylor]

Perhaps thats why such items arent included on the list for this
hypothetical machine.

Regards, NT

Now I think you are arbitrarily creating a list to suit your desired result.
If you only had devices with no moving parts I'd be less skeptical, but a
fairly random list of cheap items which are going to use spare parts which
will be too expensive in smaller quantities to make repair economic for a
'machine' like this makes me a tad skeptical of it's promise, to say the
least. I'll wait till I see you using EER techniques, then I'll give the
idea some credibility.

Cheers.

Ken

 

[N. Thornton]

Now I think you are arbitrarily creating a list to suit your desired result.
If you only had devices with no moving parts I'd be less skeptical, but a
fairly random list of cheap items which are going to use spare parts which
will be too expensive in smaller quantities to make repair economic for a
'machine' like this makes me a tad skeptical of it's promise, to say the
least. I'll wait till I see you using EER techniques, then I'll give the
idea some credibility.

Cheers.

Ken

Ken, did you read the original article? In which I explained why there
would be no payment for spare parts used, in which I explained that
the more profitable goods would be the ones selected? DVD players were
not on that list for a reason.

Am I crap at explaining things?


Regards, NT

 

[N. Thornton]

Now I think you are arbitrarily creating a list to suit your desired result.
If you only had devices with no moving parts I'd be less skeptical, but a
fairly random list of cheap items which are going to use spare parts which
will be too expensive in smaller quantities to make repair economic for a
'machine' like this makes me a tad skeptical of it's promise, to say the
least. I'll wait till I see you using EER techniques, then I'll give the
idea some credibility.

Cheers.

Ken

Hi Ken

I'd be interested to hear what you mean by EER techniques. I'm
familiar with EER amplifiers and equal error rate, but presumably you
mean something else?


Regards, NT

 

[Ken Taylor]

Hi Ken

I'd be interested to hear what you mean by EER techniques. I'm
familiar with EER amplifiers and equal error rate, but presumably you
mean something else?


Regards, NT

I suspect you realise I was being unnecessarily obnoxious with the oblique
reference to Feerguy - sorry.

My main beef(s) are the glossing over of the not-so-straightforward task of
getting a robot to take apart a case, then also the inherent contradiction
in repairing an item which is useful enough to warrant repair, but not
modern enough to be cheaply produced (which is a summarization of modern
electronics and mass production, I'm in a hurry to go to bed! .

I think 'Blue Sky' is the kindest description until you more than flesh out
some of the nitty-gritty.

Cheers.

Ken