Quote: (Originally Posted by silent running)
Thank you for explaining further, Waruteru. I may have misunderstood you. But it seems to me this whole website is already an open source. Indeed there is more information flying around on Rebreather World at any given moment than I can shake a stick at, all of it free. And I think that Alex in particular has been more open and responsive to peoples questions than just about anybody on here. Aside from a few guarded posts by Martin Parker about the APD temp stick, I don't see any evidence of people keeping secrets. How much more open can an open source be?-Andy
Who are we kidding about the industry being open?
Has any manufacturer published their MTBF figures? The reason you have not seen this is no unit has an MTBF better than 60k hours.
Has any manufacture published in the open their full FMECA? The reason you have not seen this is no unit has a MTBCF of more than 85k hours. Some are under 10k hours.
Military rebreathers are sold with the FMECA published to their buyers, otherwise the military would not buy them. Why do we not get to see the FMECA of the units we buy?
Has any manufacturer published their full EN14143 testing and compliance data?
When the unit does fail, one manufacture asked me how they could destroy the evidence. On two occasions. the first time via the "independent" agency that was supposed to find the cause of death. Witnesses were present.
Open Revolution is attempt to bring the whole field of sports rebreather design into decent norms before government agencies act and make our sport very difficult, as well as trying to make a really safe unit.
If you think I´m kidding about government intervention, take a look at what is happening gradually to diver training in the UK. Standby divers, safety divers, recompression access etc etc etc. In the not to distant future there will just a few dive training centres in the UK, who comply with all these new rules. Then read over the coroners reports. If a safety specialist were to be called as a witness, the reports would be much more damning still. Let us clean up our act before these things happen.
The idea of having Open Revolution rebreathers, hopefully from multiple sources of different design, is to share knowledge about designing safe systems. Manufacturers who do not meet basic requirements now can see what should be done, how things are done, techniques to use and not to use, as well as educating users on what is a safe practice and what is not. Much of this is in the FMECAs.
Cheers
Alex