Industrial · Strong theory
Contactless Rotating-Asset Vibration Signatures
Listens to motors and pumps through the air, spotting wear weeks before failure.
The physics is solid; our own validation is scheduled.
How it works
A running machine's casing trembles in a steady rhythm, and that trembling makes WiFi reflections flicker in time with it. Each machine has its own healthy rhythm. When bearings wear or belts loosen, the rhythm shifts and roughens — a drift the system spots long before anything breaks.
In the physics: A vibrating machine casing is a periodically moving scatterer: surface displacement of even sub-mm modulates reflected path phase, producing discrete micro-Doppler spectral lines at the vibration fundamental and harmonics (imbalance at 1x shaft rate ~10-30Hz, looseness harmonics, belt-slap sidebands) squarely inside the 0.1-40Hz Doppler band. Bearing degradation broadens and shifts these lines weeks before failure.
See it work
This is real pipeline output for Industrial, replayed. The exact reading depends on your room.
Go deeper
How the field becomes an answer
How we prove it
Own-hardware: ESP32 pair at 1-3m from a bench motor with controllable imbalance weights and worn vs new bearings; verify spectral line recovery against a reference accelerometer. Cross-check machine-motion separability on CSI-Bench machine-activity subsets.
Who it is for
Predictive maintenance for the 90% of motors too cheap to instrument — sold to the reliability engineer as 'a vibration analyst living in your WiFi.'
runtime Runs today in LatentField 2.0 as machine_vibration
The matching solution
Complete first-room estimateMachine Bay Watch6 nodes · ~$320 parts · 120 min Request kit, subscribe, or set up →Compatible DIY hardware options
120 min · advanced
240 min · installer