Tag: faults

Skoda develops new app that can diagnose car faults by sound alone

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Skoda has developed new technology it believes will make car mechanics’ lives easier – or possible make them redundant entirely.

The Czech brand – which sits under VW Group’s ownership – says it has completed successful trials of a smartphone app that can listen to any thuds, bangs or clatter produced by a vehicle and diagnose the problem from the sound alone.

Called the Skoda Sound Analyser, the manufacturer says it has a 90 per cent success rate of identifying issues with cars correctly.



a hand holding a small camera: Smart-phone app for car mechanics: Skoda has developed an application that listens to a car's engine noise to identify if it has an underlying issue that needs to be fixed by a technician

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Smart-phone app for car mechanics: Skoda has developed an application that listens to a car’s engine noise to identify if it has an underlying issue that needs to be fixed by a technician

Skoda has developed the system in house to be used by technicians in its franchised servicing departments to quickly

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New Skoda smartphone app listens to your engine to pinpoint faults

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Skoda has completed trials of a new smartphone app that it believes could make life much easier for technicians at Skoda dealerships and service centres across Europe. 

Called the Skoda Sound Analyser, the app has been developed in-house by Skoda and is a simple diagnostics tool that warns of potential faults in Skoda cars by simply listening to the engine running. 

Skoda says the system is so sensitive it can hear even the slightest irregularity in the idling of the engine, and can suggest a range of services and fixes on the spot. 

The app records the sound of the engine and compares it with a set of control recordings of healthy Skodas. It can spot discrepancies in the sound signals, and uses an algorithm to suggest the best course of action to a technician. It converts the audio file into a spectrogram – a

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House investigation faults Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google for engaging in anti-competitive monopoly tactics

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Congressional investigators faulted Facebook for gobbling up potential competitors with impunity, and they concluded Google improperly scraped rivals’ websites and forced its technology on others to reach its pole position in search and advertising. The lawmakers’ report labeled both of those firms as monopolies while faulting the federal government for failing to crack down on them sooner.

Amazon and Apple, meanwhile, exerted their own form of “monopoly power” to protect and grow their corporate footprints. As operators of two major online marketplaces — a world-leading shopping site for Amazon, and a powerful App Store for Apple — the two tech giants for years set rules that essentially put smaller, competing sellers and software developers at a disadvantage, the report found.

The House investigation stopped short of calling on the Trump administration to break up any of the companies. Instead, it proposed the most sweeping overhaul of U.S. antitrust law in

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Model shows how fluids unlock faults to unleash earthquake swarms — ScienceDaily

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Earthquakes can be abrupt bursts of home-crumbling, ground-buckling energy when slices of the planet’s crust long held in place by friction suddenly slip and lurch.

“We typically think of the plates on either side of a fault moving, deforming, building up stresses and then: Boom, an earthquake happens,” said Stanford University geophysicist Eric Dunham.

But deeper down, these blocks of rock can slide steadily past one another, creeping along cracks in Earth’s crust at about the rate that your fingernails grow.

A boundary exists between the lower, creeping part of the fault, and the upper portion that may stand locked for centuries at a stretch. For decades, scientists have puzzled over what controls this boundary, its movements and its relationship with big earthquakes. Chief among the unknowns is how fluid and pressure migrate along faults, and how that causes faults to slip.

A new physics-based fault simulator developed by Dunham

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