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Comment by qwertox | Hacker News Reader

I wish car engines had mics built in, as well as one close to each suspension.

It would record for the first 5 minutes, then at certain intervals or at certain conditions.

The car would give you FFT images which you could then look at and see how it changes over the years. No need for online-stuff, just an USB port where you stick in a big stick and software for your computer/tablet to evaluate/visualize it.

If you'd then see some problems, you could ask for the audio to be recorded with it, which you could send to a friend who knows about cars or to your car workshop.

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At Heading On we had exactly this idea, plus using Canbus, to detect when cars would need maintenance. We ended up rethinking the idea because most of the people we spoke with weren't interested.

Yea, the bigger issue is that the maintenance itself is expensive and disruptive.

The old adage "you can schedule for maintenance or your equipment will schedule it for you" is true.

There are companies working on that using AI:

Acoustic sensors in the car: https://v2minc.com/#solution

Skoda made s sound analyzer mobile app 3 years ago: https://beebom.com/this-ai-app-detects-internal-issues-in-ca...

Ah damn I need this! My Skoda has squeaky brakes, except they only squeak when you aren't pressing the brake. Clearly something is rubbing but I can't see what, and it's intermittent and also impossible to Google.

I'm skeptical it would actually work well though.

I'm surprised after this many replies no one mentioned that cars do have something pretty close to this across virtually every modern ICE: knock sensors.

Knock sensors are just ruggedized piezoelectric microphones that bolt onto your engine: when they detect a knock it's by transmitting the sound a knocking cylinder makes as an electrical signal to the ECU.

When we designed our DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle back in 2003 I considered using a guitar pickup for that, to pick up vibration and get a measure of how rough the road was.

I would love something that could use audio to diagnose problems in bikes. Issues can be hard to replicate on a repair stand when the bike is not under load.

The concept you outlined is technically very feasible but economically prohibitive. There are high value situations that incorporate these techniques as standard practice. For example, the diagnosis of rolling mill fault conditions with FFT vibration monitoring has been in practice for at least 50 years. Of course when a cold strip mill goes down, the damage can be measured in megabucks.

Nothing about this is economically prohibitive. This is predictive maintenance 101.

For consumer level cars, it is not hard to predict or catch something that is actively failing with simple visual inspections, and scheduled maintenance.

You can spend millions designing a fancy acoustic system to measure things indirectly, which will need to be installed at a cost of hundreds per vehicle and the be maintained itself. Or you just have the mechanic give it glance during an oil change (which smart mechanics are already doing free of charge), and pay attention to the dozens of existing sensors that are already reporting the critical stuff. Acoustic sensors won’t catch everything so periodic inspection is still needed.

Worth noting that all modern car engines already have acoustic sensing in the form of a knock sensor, so the car companies are well aware of sound/vibration sensing technologies.

In other words I doubt that a fancier acoustic monitoring system would prevent enough maintenance/damage to justify its own cost.

Most people don’t care about maintenance. They do it only when they must. So I doubt they would pay a penny extra for accurate forecasts of maintenance needs. Insurers and other types of dealers might though!

But wouldn’t constantly changing road types and weather conditions create so much variable noise that trending would be sloppy?

True, but people who buy expensive cars care, which is exactly the target for such a system I imagine.

I am not a mechanic but can at least hazard a guess at what's wrong with a car from the way it sounds with reasonable confidence. I imagine a purpose build AI design by the car's manufacturer with multiple microphones in the engine compartment and around the car could gain quite a lot of insight, perhaps even outside of identifying maintenance problems simply to tune the performance of the engine, especially when combined with other sensors.

Having said that, we seem to be near the end of the line for ICE vehicles, so I wouldn't hold my breath for such a system to be developed.

One of the manifestations of "I don't care about maintenance" is taking a car to the dealer/whoever on a regular schedule without understanding what they need to actually do to the car -- which is not caring about maintenance by having someone else care.

Having a report that's quickly spit out to the mechanic about issues over the past X,000 miles so they can quickly quote to the customer before it becomes a bigger issue would be nice.

It's a though market to enter, someone I know suggested doing this for a company that had a fleet of 1000+ vehicles and the representative from Bosch told them they wouldn't provide them with diagnostic tools anymore if they did.

>The car would give you FFT images which you could then look at and see how it changes

Good idea, though AI is much better at doing that in 90% of situations. So filter it thru AI first

As darling of data science Andrew Ng said, "90% of machine learning is feature engineering". So you should probably run the STFT spectrograms through machine learning models rather than the raw audio signal. And anyway raw audio is over 41k samples per second so quite low information density compared to some simple and quite common transformations like STFT anyway.

I've been thinking the same, but for PCs.

I guess nowadays SMART is pretty good, though, and you can hear if your fans are dying :). Maybe for computers that don't have RPM monitoring and aren't being listened to? It would at least be interesting data to correlate with other metrics.

It'll only make sense if insurance companies can use it to reduce your payout in an accident.

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