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Dyson gets shit on frequently for being overpriced, but the audible analysis they do one some of their products is crazy complex. Some years ago I watched 30 minute video on the design they did for the hair dryer where they were designing minute angles in the fins of the air impeller, and using a PWM algorithm to measure backpressure in a feed back loop to spin up the fan where it wouldn’t create loud noise while also increasing the volume of air moved. They tuned the mechanisms specifically to shave off tiny peaks in oscilloscope readings.
One thing I remember is that they said they couldn’t entirely eliminate the specific annoying sound frequencies because it had to ramp, but what they did is ramp to right below the annoying sound frequency level, then hold, then burst above the annoying frequency band very quickly. So the operator of the unit doesn’t hear the annoying sound because the device shoots past it so fast.
I’ve never heard of any company be that picky and put so much effort into avoiding one negative experience of a product.
Wait until you find out the analysis they do on car door closing sounds and the clickiness of specific buttons! Industrial Design is COOOL.
Buying industrial buttons and modding old controllers isn’t really mainstream but damn it should be.
A NES controller with switches and joysticks normally used in a combine harvester is really satisfying.
And then they go and make an idiotic bathroom hand air dryer that is vertical and unnatural to dip hands into and too small of an opening so as to be difficult to not touch it with your clean hands.
They released that original Airblade hand drying 18 years ago in 2006 way before the hair dryer.
11 years ago In 2013 they released the Airblade V which doesn’t do the vertical dip thing.
Well, I see the old one 99 times more often than the new one.
I’m talking about this piece of crap design.
Haven’t these been shown to be literally the proverbial shit hitting the fan in terms of spreading bacterial matter everywhere?
It’s almost like it’s a requirement for every landscaping company to use the most noisy, ear destroying, gas-powered leaf blower that they can buy that can be heard from 2 city blocks over.
Probably. lol. You look out the window to see what’s making all that racket, and you see their logo on their truck / shirts.
Especially gas-powered as they can then rev them all the time, raising the annoyance to completely new levels.
Gas powered is still vastly superior for things like leafblowers. A good gas one can last 15 years and take a total of $40 in maintenance parts for that entire time, all while blowing harder. High end battery powered ones will last 45 minutes and need a couple hundred dollars worth of replacement batteries every few years. My stihl from 1997 still works like it’s new.
Just one nitpick – usually one can swap out batteries and continue to use the tool.
30 minutes from a $100 battery vs an hour from a $1.25 in fuel, no recharging, and no batteries that go bad.
For 99% of applications, a corded electric blower with an extension cord is far superior than every other option.
I actually own one of these but never use it because extension cords are such a pain in the ass especially if you need to stretch it all throughout the yard. I really only bought it because my dryer duct was clogged with 20 years worth of lint and this blew it right out.
Cool, do they offer whistle tips?
It’s that woo-woooooo
The sad thing is the students who actually did the work will probably see no financial gain from this. Students pay to take a class and then a company pays the university for access to the students and the students ideas and work is used by a company with no financial benefit to the students. Everyone makes out except the students.
Actually unless they made it working for the university its normal for students to retain their IP rights.
I worked at a UC and companies retained all IP across all UCs and my undergrad school from the east coast was the same way. I’ve never heard of a university that let students keep their IP. I would imagine it would be hard to attract outside companies since the companies pay to be a part of the program. Can you point to a university program that allows students to retain their IP for senior design projects? I know if a student is doing a project through the school for a different class like a lab and they invent something or are volunteering the university has no claim to it but senior design is different.
Sure: https://www.research.psu.edu/otm/student_IP_guidance
This is something I’ve remember over hearing as well from a FOSS advocate as bit of complexity they deal with.
So it looks like for senior design classes the students don’t have to be associated with projects where they lose their IP rights. But sponsors have the right to say a project will give all IP to the sponsor. I imagine how this works in practice is all external companies will require they retain IP then the professor creates additional projects where ip can be retained but these are usually canned projects solving some trivial problem that won’t really allow the students to go anywhere interesting with the project. I am not saying that’s the case but I remember at my undergrad and at the UC school that was the case.
How come there are no student unions?
There are graduate students unions or research assistant unions. Undergraduates (not ones working in a lab) don’t work for the university they are customers. It would be like members of a gym unionizing. I guess it could happen maybe.
…is this not just a muffler/silencer for leaf blowers? Good on these kids! This definitely falls under the ‘why didn’t I think of that!’ category for me.
it’s electric.
Which means it’s automatically 200x quieter than a two stroke.
Idk what else they did but im pretty sure it makes almost no difference lmao.
Good job not reading any part of the article and confidently announcing your completely incorrect take on things to everyone.
correct me if im wrong here, but gas leaf blowers are inherently many times louder than electric leaf blowers to begin with. Calculating the near field DB levels doesn’t really count here since most of the annoyance is actually going to be from other people who have to listen to it running.
And since electric leaf blowers often have a much higher pitch, that pitch attenuates at a much greater rate, especially compared to that of an ICE meaning that it’s often silent, if not very quiet, at the same distance that an ICE would be rather loud at.
Also, in my defense 90% of articles these days are not worth reading, i’m sure they probably did something as i literally mentioned in my previous comment, but like i said, comparing this to a traditional ICE leaf blower (which people seem to fucking love for some reason) in comparison i’m still pretty confident that this would make almost zero fucking difference, since the vast majority of noise coming from an ICE blower is not air noise, but engine noise.
But yes thank you for telling me that i’m wrong and bad for not reading an article about an item that has probably 20-30% market share from my anecdotal experience.
And since electric leaf blowers often have a much higher pitch, that pitch attenuates at a much greater rate
As the article states, it’s this sound that they got rid of. A 94% drop in the high pitched shrill of the electric leaf blower.
Read. The. Article.
It’s a 2 minute read ffs.
Cue right wingers protesting the new “woke” leaf blowers.
Coming soon: The all new, all American, COAL powered leaf blower.
Now with a slide whistle and megaphone attachments for extra annoying noises.
Whistle goes, “Woo, woo,” but that’s only in the mo’ning.
I’ll let my gas powered leaf blower running all day now to make your woke blower useless. Get owned, sucker
There certainly are plenty of people who use those things because they enjoy being obnoxious twats.
Seeing how some very particular relatives are, I wonder if much of the gas leaf blower crowd is less “watch me stick it to the libs” and more “look at me, I’m cleaning my yard, that makes me better than you”
I forgot that this device is still being used lol. Masovian Voivodeship in Poland banned leaf blowers in 2021 as part of air quality regulation and… air actually got cleaner and no one complains about leaves on sidewalks
https://samorzad.infor.pl/sektor/zadania/srodowisko/6408199,zakaz-uzywania-dmuchawy-do-lisci.html
I don’t mind the electric ones, but I had a neighbour that would fire up a two-stroke backpack monster at 6 AM any morning there was the barest skiff of snow. And he’d try for hours blowing heavier snow that he could have had shovelled in 15 minutes. He was generally just an asshole neighbour all around.
we had a thread a while ago, and some dude was in there insisting that blowers can be “used for snow” because apparently snow blowers don’t fucking exist.
People are fucking weird dude.
I’ve used one for a very light coating or powdery snow, but more than a couple inches of that it’s just easier and faster with a shovel
Too bad no one invented rakes yet.
spoiler
sdfsaf
You ever tied using a metal rack on pavement? It’s about as pleasant as nails on a chalkboard.
“Patent pending” and already picked up by a major manufacturer. So what this means is basically while it could be a good thing… the article is basically an advertisement for an upcoming product.
Not nearly as good a thing until it gets copied/the patent gets worked around. Also, zero explanation of what was actually done to accomplish this, so again, leaning more towards “this is just advertisement with extra steps”.
Man. People will be negative about everything.
New breakthrough that may change the entire landscape of an industry? Oh, we hear about breakthroughs every few weeks. Call me if it actually makes it to market.
New apparently game changing breakthrough that’s already being taken to market? Boo advertising, we should just quiet launch it and see if anyone notices? Seriously?
what they did :
“Our product takes in a full blow of air and separates it,” said team member Leen Alfaoury. “Some of that air comes out as it is, and part of it comes out shifted. The combination of these two sections of the air makes the blower less noisy.”
Adds Chacon: “It ultimately dampens the sound as it leaves, but it keeps all that force, which is the beauty of it.”
Their design cuts the most shrill and annoying frequencies by about 12 decibels, which all but removes them, making them 94% quieter.
I wonder if that shares the same physics as silvent’s compressed air guns.
Silvent’s air nozzles reduce the sound level when blowing with compressed air compared to blowing through open pipes. This is due in part to the reduction in noisy turbulence from using Silvent’s air nozzles, and also because of the nozzles’ special design. Silvent’s air nozzles pass the compressed air through small holes and slots, which raises the sound to frequencies beyond what the human ear can perceive. This allows us to make blowing with compressed air both quiet and efficient.
Could use an even quieter compressed air gun
No, not the same … in your paragraph you describe an increase of the frequency at a level human hearing do not perceive while the other made cancellation of a given frequency using phase shifting and recombination.
wtf is shifting?
The wording is comically awkward and imprecise. But if I had to guess, they figured out a way to fiddle with how the air is routed through the secondary portion such that the emitted noise is phase-shifted to cancel out the frequencies they’re targeting.
Seems baffling
But you can’t deny it has a certain flow to it
It been brought by Black & Decker, no ?
It looks like it was sponsored by black and decker but the whole article looks like an ad for Dewalt…
This does nothing to address the lovely whirl of a 2 stroke.
Why not use a rake? It exercises you and doesn’t pollute. Plus it can make you laugh if you see someone walk into it and gets slapped cartoon style in the face.
Neighbor’s tree dumps leaves all over my concrete patio, every week. Rake doesn’t work well on concrete, doesn’t fit in every crevice the leaves fall in around my yard, and also takes awhile. Leaf blower does the job in 5 minutes. If you’re faced with this problem, you’ll pick the leaf blower over using an awkward rake for 20 minutes every week.
Also, leaf blowers are now battery powered, so concerns about gasoline emissions are not as much of a factor.
Fuck leaf blowers. I don’t care if they’re quieter. The term here is “polishing a turd.” They don’t really solve any problems. They’re not good at removing debris, but just blowing it to a place where someone else will deal with it.
Also… removing debris on its own is a dubious pursuit, since “debris” could also be termed “stuff that holds moisture longer and slows the effect of drying soil during drought conditions.”
The majority of use my leaf blower gets I blowing grass clippings from the street back into my lawn. It keeps cyclists safe and doesn’t make a mess on public travel ways. I think for that purpose they are a great solution.
The gasoline powered blowers are also one of the worst polluting motors in common use.
I want you to think about how many leaf blowers are actually being used, and how many hours even the most inefficient small engine would have to run to compare to a single semi-truck route.
It’s so incredibly fucked how you people miss the forest for the trees.
So I promise I’m not trying to be a dick here. While what you’re saying is essentially reasonable, it’s actually not true.
The amount of emissions in these small, wildly inefficient engines is considerably worse than even a large pickup truck. The reason is because emissions standards, including the introduction of catalytic converters, etc. don’t apply to lawn equipment. The result is that these don’t actually burn fuel correctly, and spew out lots of harmful pollutants in a way that even large ICE vehicles don’t.
https://grist.org/technology/lawn-equipment-pollution-report/
Like sure, there are larger sources of emissions, but I’m kinda in favor of making changes that would offer a large benefit proportionate to the amount of lifestyle change needed to make the switch. As in, making this switch would be easier than not. These emissions produce no benefit to us, and they cost us a weird amount of money to produce.
So I promise I’m not trying to be a dick, but do you actually understand the results from the articles you posted?
A basic mass balance on the claims implies a very narrow interpretation of “emissions”. It doesn’t even pass the most basic sniff test, come on.
Not only do those articles completely ignore CO2, what about the energy required to manufacture and transport the fuel in the first place?
Those studies focus on NOx emissions, a very small subset of overall environmental impact. They basically cherry pick the fuck out of what consitutes as an “emission”, and ignores the massive difference in greenhouse gasses produced.
There are claims that running a leaf blower for 30 minutes produces as much “emissions” as driving a Raptor like 1 thousand miles.
Lmao, if you think a quarter gallon of gas from the leaf blower is “worse” than 100 gallons of fuel the truck would burn, you have to be mad.
Think about it for more than a couple seconds.
And even funnier about this, the solution for this shit is already here. Aside from commercial landscaping companies, electric is already taking over. Its basically a non-issue as far as realists are concerned.
