WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:04.920 How do you fix a problem you can't even see? 00:00:04.920 --> 00:00:11.040 In smaller systems, it's not that hard. Air leak on your tire, just throw some soapy water on it 00:00:11.040 --> 00:00:15.480 and find the bubbles. Easy, but in a larger system, 00:00:15.480 --> 00:00:22.640 like our workshop's compressed air hoses, it could take a fluke to find a tiny leak somewhere. 00:00:22.640 --> 00:00:27.080 A fluke II915 acoustic imager to be exact. 00:00:27.120 --> 00:00:32.120 This $25,000 handheld camera does not work 00:00:32.560 --> 00:00:37.320 like a normal camera, you know, taking in light and transforming it into internet cloud. 00:00:37.320 --> 00:00:42.160 Instead, it takes in sound and uses it to find leaks 00:00:42.160 --> 00:00:45.200 and equipment malfunctions, even detecting noises 00:00:45.200 --> 00:00:50.520 beyond the range of human hearing. It then represents that audio like a heat map. 00:00:50.520 --> 00:00:55.440 So let's see if we can use it to find some really useful stuff like the leak in our system 00:00:55.560 --> 00:00:59.600 and maybe even a segue to our sponsor. 00:01:09.600 --> 00:01:15.000 Like so many of our videos, this one was prompted by an actual problem. 00:01:17.160 --> 00:01:21.160 That, obviously it helps a little that we shoot most of our workshop videos 00:01:21.160 --> 00:01:25.800 on the other side of this wall, but it's still been a major source of disruptions 00:01:25.800 --> 00:01:30.440 over the last few years. Now, an obvious solution would be to just 00:01:30.440 --> 00:01:34.440 not have a compressed air system, but that's not really an option. 00:01:34.440 --> 00:01:42.400 We use it for everything from cleaning things off to cutting and polishing to hacking things apart. 00:01:42.440 --> 00:01:45.600 Excuse me. And I've done a fair bit of sandblasting with it too, 00:01:45.600 --> 00:01:50.440 mostly for my personal motorbike project. So, okay, we need an air compressor. 00:01:50.440 --> 00:01:54.160 Deal with it, right? Well, see, it wouldn't be that big of a problem, 00:01:54.160 --> 00:01:57.880 except that somewhere in the system is a leak. 00:01:57.880 --> 00:02:01.000 So the compressor goes off way more often, 00:02:01.000 --> 00:02:04.240 disrupting us way more often than it needs to. 00:02:04.240 --> 00:02:09.280 That's where Fluke's acoustic imager comes in. Theoretically with this, in a matter of minutes, 00:02:09.280 --> 00:02:13.280 I should be able to track down the leak, saving us both time and money. 00:02:13.280 --> 00:02:17.640 Theoretically, I'm gonna put that to the test. I've never actually used this before, 00:02:17.640 --> 00:02:22.000 so I don't know how I'm gonna tell the difference between RHVAC system and air leaking out of a hose, 00:02:22.000 --> 00:02:23.960 but presumably it's pretty easy. 00:02:25.040 --> 00:02:26.840 Oh, there's something in this wall. 00:02:28.040 --> 00:02:31.240 Oh, there's something bouncing off this wall, I think. 00:02:31.240 --> 00:02:34.600 You'll get a lot of sounds reflecting from that sometimes. 00:02:34.600 --> 00:02:37.840 That makes sense. Keep an eye on the right side, 00:02:37.840 --> 00:02:41.840 and you'll see the range of frequency band that it's looking for. 00:02:41.840 --> 00:02:45.440 Okay, I feel like I could move pretty quickly at this point. 00:02:45.440 --> 00:02:48.680 Oh, hello, Captain, I think we've found something. 00:02:50.880 --> 00:02:54.360 Right there. Okay, but would I even be able to hear this? 00:02:54.360 --> 00:02:58.720 Oh, I can. I would have to be within like 10 inches of it, though. 00:02:58.720 --> 00:03:01.500 One to go? And that took like two minutes. 00:03:03.920 --> 00:03:07.000 Oh, geez. Okay, once you know what you're looking for, 00:03:07.000 --> 00:03:08.840 it stands out like a beacon. 00:03:10.240 --> 00:03:13.640 Oh yeah, this one's a lot more obvious. 00:03:13.680 --> 00:03:17.600 So between these two, this one was a pretty substantial one. 00:03:17.600 --> 00:03:21.400 We found both of them within just a couple minutes. This is a lot like the video Adam Savage 00:03:21.400 --> 00:03:25.160 did with this thing, hey? Two cool people can have the same cool idea 00:03:25.160 --> 00:03:29.120 at the same time. Adam Savage and ElectroBoom. 00:03:29.120 --> 00:03:33.240 And also me, just slower. I wanna show you guys, 00:03:33.240 --> 00:03:36.800 separate from the video mode, you can put it in leak Q mode. 00:03:36.800 --> 00:03:40.400 This allows you to take a picture of a leak, 00:03:40.400 --> 00:03:45.120 then according to your settings. So gas price, compression energy cost, 00:03:45.120 --> 00:03:48.200 as well as your currency, it will tell you how much that leak 00:03:48.200 --> 00:03:52.920 is gonna cost you a year. I had no idea that just a little air leak 00:03:52.920 --> 00:03:57.560 could cost $45 a year. So replacing the fitting is a no-brainer. 00:03:57.560 --> 00:04:00.560 That assumes it's running all year. I mean, it is running all year. 00:04:00.560 --> 00:04:04.560 We never turn it off. Like that's the whole thing with a leak. It's like a faucet, right? 00:04:04.560 --> 00:04:09.000 Like every once in a while, drip will waste like more gallons in a month 00:04:09.000 --> 00:04:13.040 than you could possibly fathom. Now, obviously, if the only gases you're working with 00:04:13.040 --> 00:04:16.360 are compressed air, it would take a little while for an investment like this 00:04:16.360 --> 00:04:22.400 to pay for itself. But in certain industries, this could be worth its weight in gold in cost savings. 00:04:22.400 --> 00:04:26.840 Now, while the workshop team gets those fittings sorted out, I'm gonna go see what else this thing can do. 00:04:26.840 --> 00:04:31.320 The magic of this device is really in its algorithm and precise calibration. 00:04:31.320 --> 00:04:35.920 The hardware itself is pretty simple. This array of 64 microphones 00:04:35.920 --> 00:04:39.200 is arranged in a logarithmic spiral to capture sound, 00:04:39.200 --> 00:04:42.600 and it uses beamforming to determine the source of the sound. 00:04:42.600 --> 00:04:48.480 Then it overlays that on the camera image as what Fluke calls a sound map. 00:04:48.480 --> 00:04:52.200 In the default mode, a sound map looks an awful lot like a heat map. 00:04:52.200 --> 00:04:58.200 All of this is possible because the microphones are all in known locations relative to both each other 00:04:58.200 --> 00:05:04.240 as well as to the camera right in the center. So sound hits the array and with a little bit of maths, 00:05:04.240 --> 00:05:07.480 the source can be determined by analyzing the reception delays. 00:05:07.480 --> 00:05:12.020 There are some limitations though. It's microphones pick up sound between two kilohertz 00:05:12.020 --> 00:05:15.960 and 100 kilohertz, which is well above the range of human hearing. 00:05:15.960 --> 00:05:19.560 So if you wanted to find something like a small liquid leak, 00:05:19.560 --> 00:05:25.200 say in our water cooling loop here, the frequency of a drip drip drip 00:05:25.200 --> 00:05:28.440 might actually be too low for the Fluke to pick up. 00:05:28.440 --> 00:05:34.360 Fortunately, we have an idea for that. Why not turn our liquid leak into 00:05:36.840 --> 00:05:40.200 an air leak? All we need to do is pressurize our loop. 00:05:42.400 --> 00:05:45.760 Well, that was easy. Oh, you put a hole in the tube. 00:05:45.760 --> 00:05:49.520 Usually the leaks are a lot smaller than that in these water cooling systems. 00:05:49.520 --> 00:05:54.760 I kind of wanna know if it can handle a much smaller leak like an O-ring issue or something. 00:05:54.760 --> 00:05:59.480 Every once in a while, especially on hard line fittings, these O-rings will go missing 00:05:59.480 --> 00:06:06.200 and the system can look like it's all sealed up, but when that drip gets on the back of your GPU, 00:06:06.200 --> 00:06:10.960 you're gonna have a pretty bad time. Put this up in the blue zone. 00:06:10.960 --> 00:06:16.240 You can see, even though there's no O-ring in there, it's sealed right now, 00:06:16.240 --> 00:06:19.800 but let's see if our Fluke can pick it up. Oh, dude. 00:06:21.520 --> 00:06:27.540 Easy. And that is a much, much smaller leak. 00:06:28.720 --> 00:06:33.200 What a trouble saver that would be. Now it is worth noting that our brilliant strategy 00:06:33.200 --> 00:06:36.480 of just emptying the loop and pumping it up 00:06:36.480 --> 00:06:39.920 isn't gonna work in every situation. Clean rooms, for instance, 00:06:39.920 --> 00:06:42.920 need to maintain strict control of airborne contaminants. 00:06:42.920 --> 00:06:46.280 And one of the ways that they do this is by building them to be fairly airtight 00:06:46.280 --> 00:06:49.520 and to maintain positive pressure inside, not a ton of pressure, 00:06:49.520 --> 00:06:52.720 cause like humans need to work in there, but some pressure. 00:06:52.720 --> 00:06:56.320 So how would they track down then a low pressure leak? 00:06:56.320 --> 00:07:02.580 Turns out the answer is Fluke's Beacon. This little device emits sound at 40,000 Hertz, 00:07:02.580 --> 00:07:07.740 well beyond what would bother any human. You just pop it into your system, seal it up, 00:07:07.740 --> 00:07:12.300 tune it to 40,000 Hertz, and theoretically we should be able to find our leak. 00:07:12.300 --> 00:07:16.940 I can definitely detect it through the acrylic now, but our system may be too complex 00:07:16.940 --> 00:07:21.740 for such a short wavelength to travel through like that. 00:07:21.740 --> 00:07:26.460 It's probably just because this knows there's sound coming from here or somewhere off the side, 00:07:26.460 --> 00:07:29.980 and so it's not gonna pick up the same frequency somewhere else. Hold it up over there then. 00:07:29.980 --> 00:07:33.420 Oh, dude, bingo. You know what, this would be a great opportunity 00:07:33.420 --> 00:07:37.740 to check the multiple source feature here. Ooh, yeah. 00:07:37.740 --> 00:07:40.980 So in acoustics, we can click multiple sources, 00:07:40.980 --> 00:07:44.540 and then, oh, dude, that's so cool. 00:07:44.540 --> 00:07:49.700 It'll show the different levels, however, those still totally overpower it. 00:07:49.700 --> 00:07:53.380 Really? Yeah, it really doesn't care about this leak unless it's the only one on screen. 00:07:53.380 --> 00:07:56.600 That's so funny. Very interesting. 00:07:56.600 --> 00:08:00.760 Wonder what else we could use this for? A really cool application for acoustic imagers 00:08:00.760 --> 00:08:06.760 is identifying problems with transmission towers at a distance, say, from the ground. 00:08:06.760 --> 00:08:10.560 It apparently works at up to 120 meters, or 393 feet, 00:08:10.560 --> 00:08:14.280 and can be used to detect partial discharge or arcing, 00:08:14.280 --> 00:08:18.680 the sort of thing that could lead to a forest fire. Now, we don't have anything like that to test, 00:08:18.680 --> 00:08:23.520 but we do have some whiny electronics like this GPU 00:08:23.520 --> 00:08:28.060 that has some coil wine. Now, coil wine isn't dangerous like those transmission tower problems. 00:08:28.060 --> 00:08:31.060 It's just vibrations in board components, 00:08:31.060 --> 00:08:36.380 specifically the coils, as electricity passes through. It's just, it can be pretty flipping annoying. 00:08:36.380 --> 00:08:41.260 Now, you can see that I'm not picking anything up right now. That's because this GPU isn't under load. 00:08:41.260 --> 00:08:45.700 Let's just plug in our keyboard using a handy-dandy TrueSpec cable from lttstore.com 00:08:45.700 --> 00:08:49.180 and fire up a GPU-intensive application. 00:08:49.180 --> 00:08:52.500 There it is, but where is it coming from specifically? 00:08:52.500 --> 00:08:56.520 There's a hotspot right where the 12 volt two by six 00:08:56.560 --> 00:09:00.240 comes into the back of the board. Yep, it's right across the back of the card 00:09:00.240 --> 00:09:04.520 where all the VRMs would be. Doesn't really help us solve the problem, but now we know. 00:09:04.520 --> 00:09:09.400 Actually, I had another situation very recently where coil wine was driving me absolutely nuts. 00:09:09.400 --> 00:09:12.400 I used these USB fiber optic docks 00:09:12.400 --> 00:09:17.420 in order to have my system downstairs, but my monitor and all of my peripherals upstairs. 00:09:17.420 --> 00:09:22.480 I was hearing this like high-pitched, almost like a CRT TV in the next room. 00:09:22.480 --> 00:09:27.060 Why? Now I was like, can anyone else hear that? Where is that coming from? Everyone's looking at me like I'm crazy. 00:09:29.060 --> 00:09:35.100 I'm having trouble getting it to go lower. Change the decibels from automatic to manual. 00:09:35.100 --> 00:09:39.820 It's trouble-loat when you get into the low frequencies because if you talk, you can actually see it. 00:09:39.820 --> 00:09:43.660 Exactly, when it's something that you can hear, like coil wine, it's always gonna be 00:09:43.660 --> 00:09:46.820 in the frequency that we can hear, so it can be a little bit of trouble. 00:09:46.820 --> 00:09:50.260 Right at like 10,000 Hertz. 00:09:50.260 --> 00:09:54.580 That's not even that high-pitched. Why couldn't anybody else hear this? It was driving me freaking nuts. 00:09:55.100 --> 00:09:59.420 Everyone can hear 10,000 Hertz, right? Some with hearing loss or significant age-related 00:09:59.420 --> 00:10:02.420 hearing decline might struggle to detect it. So you shouldn't have had any problems. 00:10:02.420 --> 00:10:06.940 Listen, listen. It's really cool how adjusting the frequency band, 00:10:06.940 --> 00:10:10.100 as well as the sensitivity, can really help you dial it in 00:10:10.100 --> 00:10:13.860 to detect particular things. Of course, your next question is probably, 00:10:13.860 --> 00:10:17.700 but what can I do about coil wine Linus? Some people have reported success 00:10:17.700 --> 00:10:24.380 putting schmoo over these vibrating components, but your mileage, not to mention your warranty, 00:10:25.340 --> 00:10:29.620 may vary. Is this kind of analysis a practical application for such an expensive device? 00:10:29.620 --> 00:10:33.660 Yeah, probably not, but there are more affordable options 00:10:33.660 --> 00:10:37.980 for this sort of thing. The Fluke II 500 is about eight and a half thousand dollars, 00:10:37.980 --> 00:10:41.020 but is just limited to the leak Q functionality 00:10:41.020 --> 00:10:44.380 that we showed you guys earlier with a more limited frequency band. 00:10:44.380 --> 00:10:48.100 Our II 915 has some added functions like mech Q, 00:10:48.100 --> 00:10:53.460 which detects things like a faulty bearing in an assembly line to help identify and fix problems 00:10:53.460 --> 00:10:57.260 during planned downtime, rather than when they just come up unexpectedly. 00:10:57.260 --> 00:11:01.180 But if you want to go even cheaper, you totally can. Other options are out there, 00:11:01.180 --> 00:11:07.780 and there are even open source acoustic imagers. The Cessenta, a modular system, looks like a standout. 00:11:07.780 --> 00:11:12.060 Of course, that sort of thing means that the calibration is entirely up to the user. 00:11:12.060 --> 00:11:15.500 If you're a business fan, you might not want to deal with that. All right, do you think they're done 00:11:15.500 --> 00:11:20.300 with the fixes in the shop? How'd all the fixes go? We're thinking the regulator was leaking. 00:11:20.300 --> 00:11:24.340 It may have been the hose, but we swapped both out. I wanted to replace the hoses anyway. 00:11:24.340 --> 00:11:28.900 The connection before was questionable at best. Tore the regulator down, rebuilt it, and no leaks at all. 00:11:28.900 --> 00:11:31.460 Sometimes you just have to take it apart and put it back together. 00:11:32.380 --> 00:11:35.900 This one was a little bit different. I knew that there was a leak in here because this wasn't tight enough, 00:11:35.900 --> 00:11:40.100 but I discovered that there was also an O-ring missing in her fasteners. 00:11:40.100 --> 00:11:43.820 Just completely missing? Yeah, I was actually quite surprised 00:11:43.820 --> 00:11:47.820 that it wasn't leaking worse than it was, but we ended up getting it put back in 00:11:47.820 --> 00:11:51.300 and now it's good and tight. So that was never in there? 00:11:51.300 --> 00:11:54.740 No. The whole time. Yeah. 00:11:56.500 --> 00:12:01.980 So it was only the two leaks? That was it? Well then, what is this that I'm picking up right now? 00:12:03.340 --> 00:12:07.740 Oh, I knew it. It's another segue to our sponsor. 00:12:07.740 --> 00:12:12.460 If you guys enjoyed this video, why not check out the one we did on a Caterpillar branded smartphone 00:12:12.460 --> 00:12:15.940 that has a FLIR thermal camera built into it? That was pretty cool.