this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2025
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Right to Repair
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Whether it be electronics, automobiles or medical equipment, the manufacturers should not be able to horde “oem” parts, render your stuff useless if you repair it with aftermarket parts, or hide schematics of their products.
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TL;DR, it's not nearly as granular as you suggest:
https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S2352467719300748-fx1_lrg.jpg
They can generally characterize the probability that the load is for certain things, but they can't say that your power consumption is because you're using a vacuum cleaner and 7 LED bulbs. They estimate the percentage of your overall consumption that is used by certain things. It's not the same as feeding a LLM a few cat pictures and getting it to identify a cat.
That paper is specifically about low frequency data (under 1 hz) so it does not include fast transient events. Because of that, the amount of information that you can learn is limited.
High frequency sampling can capture fast transients, startup transients and information about the circuit harmonics. This provides a lot more data points to extrapolate from. Modern smart meters are available with high frequency (several kilohertz) measurements, they may not be deployed in your utility section, but they are used.
There is more to NILM (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonintrusive_load_monitoring) than that one paper.
From the wiki: