- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
You must log in or register to comment.
I invented a leaf blower that is 100% silent and is shaped like a rake.
That’s way too expensive. I just use my fingers.
Can I borrow them to clean my yard? I promise I’ll get them right back to you.
Interesting, my rake makes some sounds when I use it. It’s pretty loud on hard surfaces.
Let me just rake up all this sand and grass clippings.
Too bad there isn’t one shaped like a broom.
I think we’re on to something here. Like, different rakes for different things to rake up. Brilliant!
“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?
IMHO, the thing that’s being promoted here isn’t the leaf blower. It’s the university’s engineering program and the opportunities it’s providing for students.
I kind of doubt someone has this University blog post in their deck of Spring 2024 leaf blower marketing initiatives.
This is the kind of stuff that the people managing internships handle in a company. Companies do this for talent acquisition. They don’t even do it for the cheap labor, because coaching students usually gobbles up a lot of your IC’s time.
Good engineering and industrial design programs find opportunities for students to work with real companies on real products.
Back in the day I used to be the student that published stuff like this to our product design department’s website. The point wasn’t to demo tech or sell a product, it was to make the program look like something worth applying to and donating to.
If a brand was name dropped, it wasn’t because we wanted to sell their thing. It was because we wanted to let applicants and alumni know that we were offering real world experience with recognizable companies. It’s basically like a reverse internship. Department faculty finds companies to bring to the students, as opposed to students applying to companies.
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
You didn’t just start using electric ones?
They probably weren’t too concerned with the emissions from the leaf blowers themselves, but the dust and whatnot they whip up into the air.
Most gas-powered leaf blowers use two-cycle engines, which produce hundreds of times more hazardous pollutants and fine particulates than cars. Leaf blowers overtook automobiles as the number one source of air pollution in California during 2020.
I did want to kneecap the idiot that decided to use a leaf blower to blow the sand off the parking lot of the apartment I used to rent in. Was kind of tempted to send the manager a bill for a new clear coat on my car.
The fucking DREAM.
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
IMO if it’s that little snow, i’m just fucking leaving it.
It’s not gonna kill me, unless it’s sitting on a solar array or something.
I live in a place where if someone slips on your sidewalk they can sue, so I’m a little more cautious about it.
Assuming we get snow ever again…
sue for what? Snow falling on the ground? There’s no way that’s getting through courts lmao.
For injuries related to slipping and falling. It’s a real thing, and why a lot of places nearby don’t even have sidewalks to avoid this liability
People forget brooms exist. Just like using a shovel during the winter.
…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.
i am aptly aware of this, in fact i’m aware of the fact that it’s actually a 12db drop in volume. Someone else kindly told me what was in the article.
But my primary point is still true.
and in defense of myself, most articles are bullshit anyway. 50% of it is filler, and 20% of it is useless information, edu sites are generally better, but there’s no guarantee, and i don’t bother with most articles these days. And my problem here isn’t even the fact that they did drop the volume of the noise, my problem is that i’m not sure this is a significant accomplishment.
There are a lot of fields actively researching this exact same concept.
So you’re not here to read articles ever? You’re just here to get corrected in comments?
i’m not here to read articles most of the time, because people talk about what’s in the article here. And in this case, leaf blowers, specifically electric ones are a bit quieter in near field operations.
Which i definitely expected, based off of the headline, but like i said, compared to a traditional ICE leaf blower, especially commercial backpack setups. Does it make a difference? Uhm. Not sure.
It’s funny to me that people yell at me about not reading articles, even though i understand the general pretense of it, without reading it. People literally corrected me by stating numbers, because that was the only thing i didn’t mention, since i didn’t read the article. And i didn’t even come here to speak about it, i mostly came here to complain about the fact that small ICE engines exist on lawn equipment.
I’m completely uneducated in this field, but there’s a 2 min video attached to that page that demonstrates before and after. Sure sounded better to me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
i’m not educated in the field specifically, but what i do have a knowledge base of is the fact that this probably isn’t a technical W for the leaf blower industry, especially judging that most commercial leaf blowers are gas ICE based equipment, and that even with the home market being more accessible than ever, a lot of home owners still use ICE based equipment.
Put together with the fact that the high pitch whine attenuates aggressively at distance, compared to much lower pitches. It’s likely that it has little benefit for anybody other than the user, in which case, hearing protection.
I’m sure this is a more broad accomplishment, but this has been a field of study across multiple industries for multiple reasons.
how they did it:
they used an electric motor.
They started with an electric leaf blower as a baseline. Theirs is 40% quieter than the current electric leaf blowers on the market.
that’s pretty cool.
Unfortunately not very many people seem to use electric leaf blowers here, and even if you were to transmute that addition to an ICE blower it wouldn’t make a difference considering that the engine would still be loud as fuck.
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.
How come there are no student unions?
Then they’d have to start paying student ath-a-leets. 😉
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.
deleted by creator
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.
Mwap!
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…
Black and Decker owns DeWalt.
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.
They also really really work well, theyre over engineered like crazy but last forever.
Maybe the old Dysons. The new ones are rubbish. Shark all the way.
Newer ones don’t. They’re usually dead in 2-4 years.
Wait until you find out the analysis they do on car door closing sounds and the clickiness of specific buttons! Industrial Design is COOOL.
Meanwhile, Subaru phoned it in with their window switches…
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.
Haha no that’s not what I meant. Industrial Design is a profession and automotive industrial designers design all sorts of things, from the shape of the body to the swoopiness of a headlight to the specific clacky feel of various buttons.
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.
Maybe I’ve got small hands, but I’ve never had problems with them. I slightly cup my hands. At least it feels like they get dryer faster that way.
Maybe it was just me but I never had issues with the u shaped dryers. Although I normally put my hands in by the side, wrists above, kept them flat, and drew out slowly. Dry hands every time.
Other dryers just end up pushing water to the dry side of your hand.
That came way before the hair dryer, no?
Haven’t these been shown to be literally the proverbial shit hitting the fan in terms of spreading bacterial matter everywhere?
Yes they literally pull in particles from the bathroom air and blow them directly on your hands.
Plus a good chunk of people only wash hands for show: the water runs for 1 sec it barely touches their fingertips, then go on to these dryers and whatever is on their hands flies out everywhere.
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.
All this tells me is that they have a great PR department.
I have to run out of the bathroom when my wife uses her Dyson hair dryer because it hurts my ears, and you’re telling me this is by design?!
Not necessarily for sound, on industrial fans and drives, we can program in skip frequencies to avoid any resonance issues in the system. I’ve never done it for noise reduction. But I do some tweaks for efficiency and power consumption reduction. There’s some wild industrial design stuff out there, and in the end, it’s because it provides something the customer wants. I won’t go into specifics, but you can design the same components the same for multiple manufacturers and do some slightly different things in its construction to give the vibe the OEM wants, or to fix some inherent characteristics in the manufacturers platform. It’s REALLY cool when you think about it. Sorry to be so vague, but I have to be.
this is pretty cool but it’d be cooler if the started supporting right to repair. As far as i can care they’re cunts until they stop producing manufactured e-waste products.
Can I get those STL files? I’m gonna print one for each of my neighbors
Here’s the email of one of the students that were involved in the project. Try directly reaching out to them:
Madison Morrison: [email protected]
No, the university gets to license it and squeeze all the cash out first. Try again in 15 years.
🏴☠️
Give then a Nobel Prize!
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.
Battery-powered silent leaf blowers. We really are in the future.
Can’t wait to use this in Leaf Blower Revolution
Cool, do they offer whistle tips?
It’s that woo-woooooo
Whoever made that title should be launched into a volcano on the moon
