Slashdot Mirror

https://tech.slashdot.org/stor...

Engineers (never says software anywhere) from a manufacturing technology company (not a software company, thought they have some software). You seem a little biased on this.

https://www.instrumental.ai/#b...

They design hardware for manufacturing lines, hardly a software company spouting off, they do this stuff for a living.

None of what you said has ANYTHING to do with what I wrote, nor what was in the article. Did YOU read the article, or did you just jump straight to the TEAM link at the top to "play the man, not the ball"?

This is the company in question. https://www.instrumental.ai/te...

It's a small startup of 9 people with no history. None of the people are even listed as mechanical engineers. They're all software engineers (which isn't a recognized profession, by the way) and business people. Not a one among them has the authority to make any claims about the Note 7.

Thanks for the link. Very helpful. If you read the article, you know that it says in the second paragraph (why don't I have to read beyond the first screen?):

As hardware engineers ourselves, Sam and I followed the story closely.

We can use the link you provided to find out who "Sam and I" are, and with its helpful embedded linkedin links, find out what just how unqualified they are to comment on the Samsung phone:

Anna Shedletsky

• Nearly 6 years experience as a System Product Design Engineer at Apple, including Apple Watch System Product Design Lead.
• Key specialties: mechanical design for mass production, in-factory implementation, data-based decision making, and rising to challenges.
• Stanford University Mechanical Engineering Bachelors and Masters. Continued education in Chinese.
• Apple Watch System Product Design Lead and Manager, October 2012 - February 2015
• iPod Product Design Engineer, July 2009 - October 2012

Samuel Weiss

• Massachusetts Institute of Technology BS Mechanical Engineering; Mathematics
• Stanford University Mechanical Engineering Masters
• Product Design Engineer - Apple Watch, July 2012 - June 2015

Oh dear. I certainly hope that those two experienced mechanical engineers spent more time examining the Note 7 problem than you spent attempting to trash their reputations. I guess Slashdot pest isn't a recognised profession either.

Most significantly - they are software people trying to pimp their startup company (announced 10/31/2016).

https://www.instrumental.ai/te...
https://www.instrumental.ai/bl...

Most significantly - they are software people trying to pimp their startup company (announced 10/31/2016).

https://www.instrumental.ai/te...
https://www.instrumental.ai/bl...

It's not Slashdot "catching wind" of this. It's the startup company Instrumental writing a blog post and shopping it around to all the tech sites to get people to go find out what the company Instrumental is and does.

From their website http://www.instrumental.ai/ , it looks like they sell services to companies that manufacture things.

Their case study with Pearl Auto seems like they landed the gig because Pearl Auto is a startup run by a friend.

And as far as I can tell the most work they actually do is put camera and other sensors in the assembly line and use image analysis software to alert on differences. Beyond that, they're consultants.

Their "case study" supports this, as does their team page (all software people) and their hiring page (they need a mechanical engineer and a computer vision person).

If they do anything more substantial than that it isn't supported by their website, which is little more than a blog, bios, and links to LinkedIn profiles. They announced their existence on October 31st of 2016, after "over a year in stealth". Yet today, they're ground-breaking research into a single Note 7 is plastered across every tech site, blog, and news aggregator.

I don't know if they know anything about manufacturing products or not, but they do know a thing or two about manufacturing clicks,

If this was the case then a slightly physically smaller battery would have solved the problem. They could have achieved this quite easily, even if it meant sacrificing capacity. And given they started by recalling the phones and replacing the batteries but there were still problems I would suggest they are wrong.

Did you even look at the linked report? These engineers have the benefit of hindsight. They knew that the initial attempts to fix the problem failed; it's mentioned in the very first paragraph of the linked report. They said that sources from within Samsung had various theories as to the cause, so whatever fix that Samsung did it was the wrong theory. Just because Samsung got it wrong (twice) doesn't mean that these engineers were wrong.

Your post mirrors what was in the second paragraph of the report:

But, if it was only a battery part issue and could have been salvaged by a re-spin of the battery, why cancel the product line and cede several quarters of revenue to competitors? We believe that there was more in play: that there was a fundamental problem with the design of the phone itself.

It's amazing that you can claim that what these engineers deduced wrong when you haven't even read even the first two paragraphs of what they thought. RTFA.

Did YOU look at it? Did YOU RTFA? No, you didn't.

This is the company in question. https://www.instrumental.ai/te...

It's a small startup of 9 people with no history. None of the people are even listed as mechanical engineers. They're all software engineers (which isn't a recognized profession, by the way) and business people. Not a one among them has the authority to make any claims about the Note 7. None of them have the actual experience with the Note 7 to do so either - they had a single sample that they couldn't actually do anything with other than write the blog post and fish it out to tech sites for hits and to get their name out there.

The Note 7 is fucked. Samsung knows why, Google and Apple likely know why, and I'm sure various state actors know why. A startup of 9 young, hip, individuals with a background in software engineering who got their hands one one single unit and saw that it was a tight fit don't know why.

We know what the problem is. The batteries burst into flames. We know why this happens in lithium-based batteries, and we know how to build batteries to not do this in a specified operational environment.
Heat, shorts, pressure on cells, insufficient or incorrect materials within the battery, encasing the battery, etc. One or more of these things was insufficient for the application in question (powering the Note 7 in a typical environment). We don't know which and to what degree. The few that do know why haven't said.

Software "engineers" at best.
This is the company in question. https://www.instrumental.ai/te...

It's a small startup of 9 people with no history. None of the people are even listed as mechanical engineers. They're all software engineers (which isn't a recognized profession, by the way) and business people. Not a one among them has the authority to make any claims about the Note 7. None of them have the actual experience with the Note 7 to do so either - they had a single sample that they couldn't actually do anything with other than write the blog post and fish it out to tech sites for hits and to get their name out there.