Software Startup Focuses on Fastener Compression Lines

Open-source software developer Sight Machine is adapting software tools and formulations to the conservative manufacturing sector, the O’Reilly Radar reports. Their target?  “Demanding engineers who run giant factories that produce things like automotive bolts,” writes John Bruner of O’Reilly.

“At its heart is something of a crossover group — programmers and designers who are comfortable with Silicon Valley-style fast innovation, but who have deep roots in Midwestern industry.”

Sight Machine’s founders decided to sell their software as “a simple, effective, and modular solution and downplay the stack of open-source and proprietary software,” he O’Reilly Radar reports.

Sight Machine’s software measures grain-flow characteristics in a fastener, using little more than a commercial flat-bed scanner.

“There’s a huge disconnect [in heavy industry] from the Internet way of doing things,” says co-founder Kurt DeMaagd. “Process engineers are very data-driven, but they haven’t tried these new tools, and they’re not working in real-time.”

The goal was to build a system that would raise immediate flags, “as opposed to saying, ‘hey, a week ago we were having quality-control problems.’”

“Sight Machine’s first client manufactures bolts — fasteners, as they’re called by industrial insiders — checking the integrity of their steel at the beginning and end of each batch by slicing one open and scanning it on a cheap flatbed scanner,” writes John Bruner.

“Software discerns the dimensions of the steel’s grain (compression lines that form when the head of the bolt is pounded out) and provides an instantaneous quantitative measure of quality. The previous method had involved employees looking at bolts through microscopes.”

“Industrial firms tend to be conservative in adopting new systems, for a reason: the costs of a plant outage are huge (consider that a large auto assembly plant might produce more than 60 vehicles per hour — an outage of just one minute is equivalent to one car’s worth of lost production). They also tend to have enormous amounts of capital tied up in big, integrated production systems, making changes costly.”

“Software and industry are inching closer; the industrial Internet will make it easier for innovators to turn physical-world problems into software problems, and then solve them using rich open-source tools and pervasive networks, Bruner concluded.

(O’Reilly has published a book on SimpleCV, written by four of Sight Machine’s principals.) ©2013 GlobalFastenerNews.com