Guidewheel
Hardware : Information Technology : Machine Health
This is the era of AI and the “industrial internet” – complex systems that can help huge factories run at peak efficiency. But that’s for the elite one percent of manufacturers. What about the rest? Guidewheel is on a mission to empower all the world’s factories to reach sustainable peak performance. Our plug-and-play FactoryOps platform makes the power of the cloud accessible to any factory, inspired by the simple, universal truth that every machine on the factory floor has a power cord. Guidewheel clips onto any machine to turn its real-time “heartbeat” into a connected, actively learning system that empowers teams to reduce lost production time, increase throughput, and perform better and better over time. The more teams use Guidewheel, the bigger the impact—for their business and for the planet. Founded out of Stanford University and backed by Greycroft, Guidewheel went through Stanford’s Launchpad as well as top accelerator StartX. Guidewheel’s product has been recognized with prizes from Stanford and MIT, and the team brings both manufacturing expertise and success building world-class cloud software at scale.
Assembly Line
Machine Monitoring Becomes Simpler And More Affordable Than Ever
What makes all this possible is a new application of a simple technology—the current transformer, essentially an amperage meter. As Dunford explains, maintenance engineers have used these small, inexpensive devices for decades to detect, for example, when a machine starts drawing excess power, possibly indicating a need for maintenance or even an impending malfunction.
Guidewheel uses the same information to detect when a machine is running or stopped, how long it has been running or not, and the number and period of cyclical operations. In the case of continuous operations such as extrusion, the level of current draw can be correlated with production rate.