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Augmented Reality To Help Mechanics Fix Vehicles
kkleiner writes "ARMAR, or Augmented Reality for Maintenance and Repair, is a head mounted display unit that provides graphic overlays to assist you in making repairs. An Android phone provides an interface to control the graphics you view during the process. Published in IEEE, and recently tested with the United States Marine Corps on an armored turret, ARMAR can cut maintenance times in half by guiding users to the damaged area and displaying 3D animations to demonstrate the appropriate tools and techniques."
Boeing started using this tech in the early 90's to help assemble cables in aircraft. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augmented_reality
Obligatory link to story detailing the reduction of humans to a mere servo in the machine.
Replacing an ECU (PCM, same thing) is a tricky venture sometimes.
Being the honest mechanic, I usually offered an alternative to my customers. I let them decide after explaining.
I had a roughly 50% success rate of fixing these cars--cars that all testing seemed to indicate a wonky/bad ECU--by simply taking the circuit board out of the ECU housing (carefully!) and giving it a gentle twist on two different axis, then re-installing it.
50% of the time the problem went away, never to return. The other 50% of the time it ended up needing replacement eventually. If the customer didn't mind the risk of the problem re-occuring they usually went for the twist test. Saved my customers thousands of dollars.
I have no idea why this fixes some ECUs. Since all the connections are board-soldered, I can olny assume stressing the internals of some component on the board was enough to get it back in spec. Weird, I know.
My own Chrysler Town and Country had this "repair" done to it to solve an intermittent turn signal loss...4 years ago...and it still works.
Since figuring this out, I do this on ANY malfunctioning device with circuit boards...take them out, give 'em a twist and re-install them. It often fixes the problem. Fixed a laptop, two PCs, a stereo amplifier and a snowmachine this way.