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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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
All this tells me is that they have a great PR department.
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.
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.
Meanwhile, Subaru phoned it in with their window switches…
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?!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Especially gas-powered as they can then rev them all the time, raising the annoyance to completely new levels.
Probably. lol. You look out the window to see what’s making all that racket, and you see their logo on their truck / shirts.
It’s advertising!
Cue right wingers protesting the new “woke” leaf blowers.
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.
The same kind of morons rolling coal and destroying their engines.
I instantly imagined someone rolling coal with their leaf blower… you know it’s going to happen, even if they’re not diesel.
This is very true. I just know my neighbour wouldn’t choose a quieter option if he had the chance
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”
And by “cleaning my yard” they really mean “blowing whatever I consider a mess onto whatever is beside my yard, or in the general vicinity for the dust”.
Blowing coal lel
No, they’ve moved on to “DEI” as their racist dogwhistle now. Keep up.
“I’d never even heard of this 2 weeks ago, but after watching a single 90-second segment on Fox News, it’s all I can talk about and clearly the reason why the country is failing!”
Cue the left-wingers being rage-baited about the right wingers protesting the new “woke” leaf blowers.
All the while the leaf blower manufacturer is getting free publicity.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=06yy88tLWlg
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
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.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/zUXow3d3-b0?si=gr_4SDhNm3yUH0A6
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
pasta powered leaf blower
For the people not reading the article. This is not about gas leaf blowers.
The challenge was to take an electric leaf blower and make it even quieter.
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
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.
You didn’t just start using electric ones?
The fucking DREAM.
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?
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
I invented a leaf blower that is 100% silent and is shaped like a rake.
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!
Interesting, my rake makes some sounds when I use it. It’s pretty loud on hard surfaces.
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.
Too bad these innovations wont make it down to the workers that stores hire from 11pm to 3am to clean the store parking lot across from me.
Good thing is you could 3d print some and give them to them. If they use a compatible blower that is. Or if you’re handy with modeling you could probably modify the attachment part.
(10 hours of work later)
“Ok how much money will this save me for the risk of your plastic thing melting all over my blower.”
Can I get those STL files? I’m gonna print one for each of my neighbors
No, the university gets to license it and squeeze all the cash out first. Try again in 15 years.
🏴☠️
Here’s the email of one of the students that were involved in the project. Try directly reaching out to them:
Madison Morrison: mmorr114@jh.edu
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.
Yeah the rakes don’t like it too much when you use them on the road too
A broom works fine for that.
Not wrong
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.
Savage turnaround
Do you have any solid information to provide or are you just making vague allusions toward some unsubstantiated assumptions so you can justify to yourself being a judgmental ass?
It’s so incredibly fucked how “you people” are judgmental shits who are busy jerking yourself off every time you can “well ackshally” someone.
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Absolutely. And all those emissions are taking place very close to a human’s face.
I actually see street cleaning teams here in Germany regularly where one person blows the dirt out from bike racks and from under parked cars and the other person sits in the big street sweeper to pick up the dirt. I think this is a very valid use for blowers. The blowers are electric, but I sure would.not mind them a bit more quiet.
Mwap!
…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.
Removed by mod
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.
Too bad no one invented rakes yet.
You ever tied using a metal rack on pavement? It’s about as pleasant as nails on a chalkboard.
spoiler
sdfsaf
Kinda, although recent vacuum cleaners are way less noisier than gas-powered leaf-blowers.
Well now I want a gas-powered vacuum
Jackhammers are so loud, haven’t they heard of a hammer yet? I am very smart btw.
What do leaf blowers do that rakes don’t? I don’t remember the last time I saw or heard a leaf blower.
Cool, do they offer whistle tips?
Give then a Nobel Prize!
