Insane Hydraulics
Bold and audacious blog about fluid power
My friends, today I want to announce yet another "insane" project - and this time it is going to be a web app that will solve a very peculiar problem for me and, hopefully, for everyone else who may have it.
I also think that it will be perfect for gauging real visitor engagement, allowing me to make an informed decision about the direction this blog will be taking.
Let me start with describing the problem that I am aiming to solve. Here's what happened to me just the other day, but I can state that I'd seen variations of this scenario countless times before - a client came to our shop with a pretty battered and corroded solenoid coil with a broken-off connector and no discernible markings, all he could tell was that it "came from a hydraulic pump", and he was looking for a replacement.
Of course, as a hydraulic shop, we are no strangers to such situations, and we have been using aids like Excel spreadsheets, or even handwritten tables, that were (painstakingly) filled to help techs or folks in sales identify solenoid coils by their dimensions (usually the hole diameter and the height) and voltage. I have been using them too, for a long time, and it always felt to me that they were somewhat cumbersome to use, and the success was, well... "mixed" at best.
Take the coil I mentioned earlier - strangely, our "go-to" spreadsheet didn't have that many coils with the 19 mm hole, but that particular coil also had a 23 mm recess on one end, and so a "normal" coil with a 19 mm hole all the way through would not work there. I was only able to recognize it because I overhaul hydraulic pumps, and so I see similar coils quite often - it was a a coil from a proportional displacement control of a Rexroth A4VG closed-loop pump. Things "happened fast", and so I didn't take pics of the old and battered one, but here's the new one that we got for the customer just to demonstrate what I mean:
If I didn't recognize this coil, however, I would probably have to shovel through a bunch of catalogs (SUN, Comatrol, Wandfluh, Bosch Rexroth, etc., because all these brands offer 15x50 coils). Then I would have to search online, ask an AI (darn it!), then search some more and spend a lot of time doing so. I hope you get the picture - what I really need is one single place that I can access from anywhere and where I can search for solenoid coils of multiple brands by arbitrary parameters - dimensions, electrical characteristics, connector type, partial part number, and more.
But that is not all. I also want to be able to access the respective catalogs immediately, I want to be able to visualize images or drawings (when available), and most importantly, I want to be able to add personal tags to coil records so that I can easily find them in the future through a convenient tag search (kind of like a digital version of writing on the box with a Sharpie).
Now, I am very far from being a professional programmer, but I know just enough backend stuff to be able to create a simple, hobby-grade CRUD web app wired to a database. You may ask me - why haven't I done so already? I have a good answer to that: while creating such an app is actually both easy and a lot of fun, filling the database with coil data would be a super tedious nightmare, especially if you consider the fact that an average coil catalog has hundreds of part numbers in it.
However, not all is lost, my friends, because there is a solution now, and while I may not be particularly fond of it, I can't look past it either - and the solution is... (drum roll) the freaking AIs, which are awfully silly when it comes to answering even basic hydraulic questions, but are exceptionally good at scraping documents for data!
So, my current plan is:
I really appreciate you reading this far, and I would love to know if you ever faced this same problem and hear your opinion, so if you have any thoughts or comments about this app idea, please shoot me an email.
And, as always - stay tuned for updates, and be safe out there!