Why the fuck does someone need a wrench connected to the internet in the first place?
I went appliance shopping recently and the salesman tried to get me on board with a WiFi connected fridge, his sales pitch was that I’ll get a push notification on my phone when the air or water filter need to be changed, and there’s a camera so if I’m at the store and I can’t remember if I need to buy milk, I can open the camera app and view the inside of my fridge and see my milk level. GTFO, not everything needs to have an app or internet service.
For normal consumers, it is absolutely a useless and stupid feature.
For safety-critical assembly line and maintenance applications, having the torque wrench networked enables a high degree of auditability. A highly pertinent current example would be the 737 MAX9 fuselage plug issues - if this device were incorporated into production and maintenance processes, it could enable manufacturing and maintenance audits down to the precise torque value used for each fastener, which likely could have prevented the issue entirely. Or… considering the timing, maybe they were being used, and the wrenches were compromised.
Why the fuck does someone need a wrench connected to the internet in the first place?
I went appliance shopping recently and the salesman tried to get me on board with a WiFi connected fridge, his sales pitch was that I’ll get a push notification on my phone when the air or water filter need to be changed, and there’s a camera so if I’m at the store and I can’t remember if I need to buy milk, I can open the camera app and view the inside of my fridge and see my milk level. GTFO, not everything needs to have an app or internet service.
If you’re too lazy to read the article:
For normal consumers, it is absolutely a useless and stupid feature.
For safety-critical assembly line and maintenance applications, having the torque wrench networked enables a high degree of auditability. A highly pertinent current example would be the 737 MAX9 fuselage plug issues - if this device were incorporated into production and maintenance processes, it could enable manufacturing and maintenance audits down to the precise torque value used for each fastener, which likely could have prevented the issue entirely. Or… considering the timing, maybe they were being used, and the wrenches were compromised.