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posted by martyb on Saturday August 12 2017, @03:05AM   Printer-friendly
from the safety-is-no-accident dept.

In 2015, 4,700 people in the US lost a finger or other body part to table-saw incidents. Most of those injuries didn't have to happen, thanks to technology invented in 1999 by entrepreneur Stephen Gass. By giving his blade a slight electric charge, his saw is able to detect contact with a human hand and stop spinning in a few milliseconds. A widely circulated video[1] shows a test on a hot dog that leaves the wiener unscathed.

Now federal regulators are considering whether to make Gass' technology mandatory in the table-saw industry. The Consumer Product Safety Commission announced plans for a new rule in May, and the rules could take effect in the coming months.

But established makers of power tools vehemently object. They say the mandate could double the cost of entry-level table saws and destroy jobs in the power-tool industry. They also point out that Gass holds dozens of patents on the technology. If the CPSC makes the technology mandatory for table saws, that could give Gass a legal monopoly over the table-saw industry until at least 2021, when his oldest patents expire.

At the same time, table-saw related injuries cost society billions every year. The CPSC predicts switching to the safer saw design will save society $1,500 to $4,000 per saw sold by reducing medical bills and lost work.

"You commissioners have the power to take one of the most dangerous products ever available to consumers and make it vastly safer," Gass said at a CPSC public hearing on Wednesday.

Source: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/08/patent-disputes-stand-in-the-way-of-radically-safer-table-saws/

[1] SawStop Hot dog Video - Saw blade retracts within 5 milliseconds of accidental contact - YouTube.


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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Saturday August 12 2017, @01:45PM (4 children)

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Saturday August 12 2017, @01:45PM (#552842)

    They have to hurry to embed this into law. We're very close to using machine vision and AI to detect the operator doing something really stupid, and non-contact vision being much earlier warning instead of destroying the motor / brakes / blade it can be decelerated at a very fast but not self-destructive rate.

    Its very hard for a human hand to move over 100 mph controllably like while throwing a baseball. For an engineering estimate 1 mph is 1 foot per second (yeah no kidding its not 1:1 but its also not more than 10:1 off). Your average saw spins about 60 times per second. Lets say the machine vision system can tell you're about to F up and stick your hand in the blade at 100 mph incoming speed from 1/2 a foot away, thats about 1/200th of a second warning. That's about a third of a rotation of the saw blade which should be survivable and not need hardware replacement time every time it fires.

    Its interesting that 1/200th of a second is so slow (compared to contact detectors) that you could just use springs and solenoids to launch the blade and motor beneath the table.

    So with physical contact detection you need the saw to basically self destruct, but with machine vision based monitoring, the fastest baseball pitcher in the world can't punch the saw fast enough for a non-self destructive safety system to work.

    The point is the guy wants to use the patent system and human suffering to make money, but he's literally just a couple years, maybe mere months, away from technological obsolescence, so he needs to hurry up and buy laws from our legal system while he can. Maybe this soon to be obsolete technology could be milked for decades once its forced into law that its the only legal technology "stack" for the problem.

    TLDR is the saw stop of the future (phrase in the sense of all photocopiers are Xerox machines) is something like a raspi-zero and a webcam and some real time os processing and some spring and solenoid system on the saw depth of cut mechanism. All this "shoot a shotgun slug into the moving blade" junk is about to be obsolete so the legal scam has to be implemented Right Now or it'll be too late for the legacy tech.

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  • (Score: 2) by Pslytely Psycho on Saturday August 12 2017, @09:00PM (3 children)

    by Pslytely Psycho (1218) on Saturday August 12 2017, @09:00PM (#552969)

    "Its interesting that 1/200th of a second is so slow (compared to contact detectors) that you could just use springs and solenoids to launch the blade and motor beneath the table"

    Bosch already has a system like this called REAXX. It does exactly what you describe and uses a replaceable cartridge so you don't damage the machine like this system does as it drives a piece of aluminum into the blade to stop it.

    "The point is the guy wants to use the patent system and human suffering to make money"

    Yep, he even sued Bosch over their tech. He wants a monopoly.

    --
    Alex Jones lawyer inspires new TV series: CSI Moron Division.
    • (Score: 2) by Sulla on Saturday August 12 2017, @10:24PM

      by Sulla (5173) on Saturday August 12 2017, @10:24PM (#552999) Journal

      I would shell out for the double-double. I want it to detect and drop and also wreck the blade if the sensors fail.

      How well does the bosch sensor hold up to getting covered in dust?

      --
      Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
    • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 12 2017, @10:42PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 12 2017, @10:42PM (#553008)

      Bosch already has a system like this called REAXX. It does exactly what you describe and uses a replaceable cartridge so you don't damage the machine like this system does as it drives a piece of aluminum into the blade to stop it.

      I tried to find those cartridges, and what I came up with is $100 for a double. So a wet spot in wood, or a hot dog, will cost you $50. I'm hoping what I found was wrong, and for $100 you get 20 of them.

      • (Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday August 13 2017, @01:35PM

        by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Sunday August 13 2017, @01:35PM (#553240)

        So a wet spot in wood, or a hot dog, will cost you $50.

        Well there you go. Thats kinda my point that with the sensor being based on physical touch capacitance or resistance in a circuit going thru the operator, with machine vision instead of requiring the speed of a shotgun shell or a electrical blasting cap or whatever, a mere reusable spring and solenoid "should be fast enough". Note that my numbers were kind of ridiculous and most people don't thru a baseball pitcher 100 mph pitch at a table saw blade... technically it doesn't have to disappear before the hand arrives, it merely needs to accelerate fast enough to be moving away from the hand faster than the hand is moving toward it by the time the hand arrives...