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Comment by omeze | Hacker News Reader

This is really cool - based on the project page it uses off the shelf models like Yolo and Tesseract plus a ton of synthetic data (which is also freely available). Also solves a real industrial use case!

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I'm surprised something like reading gauges is not one of the entry level computer vision problem data sets. It seems to obviously useful.

Well, I hope that for any serious application they would replace the analog gauges with sensors that produce values that can be directly read by a computer system, rather than teaching it to read the analog gauges. So I think the actual real-world usefulness of this is rather limited...

I guess you're unaware of the gargantuan number of legacy manufacturing plants littered all over the globe that are trying to retrofit current tech over 40+ year old tech while it is still operating. Think 2nd and 3rd world manufacturing; far larger than you probably imagine.

Also 1st world manufacturing.

My company has a huge legacy business where we are still manufacturing brand new PC boards with intel 8086's on them. We have a huge inventory of 40 year old chips for it, lol.

Nobody wants to upgrade when the current system still works and can be supported (however painfully).

Exactly, I use to think the same thing! Many legacy system, the industrial machines that run factories, infrastructure, etc. all have hundreds of gauges and some of them do get "watched". Cost of digitization via smart gauges just cost too much and planning that goes into replacing them often isn't tenable. So many instrument readings don't get logged - until some machine fails. There are systems out there, but they aren't affordable to make a broad impact - I hope we can progress to change that.

Its very common for plant operators to do 'rounds' and inspect gauges that are not digital because they are not usually terribly important, because the gauge provides a backup to the electronic reading, etc.

Put this on a 'spot' robot from Boston dynamics and you have an operator that won't be hurt when there is a steam leak, or whatever.

There are definitely use cases.

It would be even more trivial to just have cameras and a human who can quickly scroll through the different cams to check the gauges.

The question is how much you trust this vision system, not whether or not you still need a guy to do rounds.

No, fixed cameras have a linear maintenance cost and are subject to all the regular problems fixed infrastructure has. A robot has the same cost whether it spends all day walking in circles or doing rounds.

You would probably have to pay for 80 years of "camera maintenance" before you met the cost of 1 robot.

The cv reading here is really a POC base on off-the-self and will require some work. Fix-camera vs Spot, I can definitely see the pros and cons. So at what price point do you think industry will adopt Spot for doing rounds?

I recall there was a project integrating utility meters into Home Assistant, where a tiny ESP board with on-device ML used a camera to read the analog gauge, basically the most practical solution given you can't replace or modify your utility meter and only a handful offer a serial port.

Yup, the components can be replaced to your liking and expand the data to your match your environment better. I found it really interesting how, no matter how I prompted foundational models they couldn't read gauges.

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