The old machine stays itself, but now it reports

The problem

The longest process in the shop is also the one that runs blind.

EDM is the long process of the shop and the one most often run unattended at night. It is exactly the process where a silent stoppage does the most damage: nobody finds out until the next morning whether a cycle stopped after two hours on an electrode alarm or ran the nine hours planned. A night lost on a critical detail translates directly into a night lost on the tooling date, because the bench comes after EDM and the bench cannot start early. The builder delivered that machine with a closed control and no network by design. Opening it is not an option: it compromises the warranty and is not always technically possible.

• The machine is ten to twenty-five years old, still cuts flawless cavities and lives on an island: gap, electrode wear, remaining time and alarms exist only on its screen.
• EDM runs unattended at night. Nobody knows until the next morning whether the cycle stopped after two hours on an electrode alarm or ran the nine hours planned.
• A night lost on a critical detail is a night lost on the tooling date, because the bench comes after EDM and the bench cannot start early.
• Opening the control is not an option: it compromises the builder's warranty and is not always technically possible. Replacing the machine costs hundreds of thousands and a shutdown the calendar cannot absorb.

How it fits the IRIS system

Connect in photo-over-panel mode — solved from outside the machine.

Connect in photo-over-panel mode, the canonical IRIS answer to a machine that cannot speak.

It opens no network, touches no control and voids no warranty. The camera reads what the screen already shows, every few seconds, and iLEAN ties the series to the detail loaded in that machine. The machine stays exactly itself; what changes is that the shop now knows whether the cavity finishes tonight or tomorrow at noon, and the bench can be told when it can genuinely start. Over months, the series per detail becomes the process history the older machines never had.

• A fixed industrial camera aimed at the control screen.
• Capture every few seconds. OCR and a grounded LLM read each frame: state, remaining time, alarm, electrode counter.
• iLEAN structures the time series and ties it to the detail currently loaded in that machine.
• If the cycle stops outside plan, the supervisor is alerted in minutes, not the following morning.

No machine network is opened, no control is touched, no warranty is voided. The machine stays exactly itself.

See the full IRIS architecture →

Before and after

Today's EDM versus the EDM being read

Aspect	Today	With iLEAN Connect
A stoppage at 23:00	Discovered at 07:00	Alert in minutes
Remaining time on the cavity	On the screen, for nobody	Visible from the schedule
Process history per detail	None	A curve, correlatable with the finish
Electrode wear	Noticed at the next inspection	Read from the counter, frame by frame
The machine's control	—	Untouched, no port opened
Replacement decision	Forced by lack of data	Can wait

from learning about a night stoppage the next day → an alert in minutes. From zero process history on the older machines → a curve per detail, correlatable with the finish obtained. From a replacement decision forced by lack of data → a decision that can wait.

Impact estimate

Impact estimate — to be validated with your numbers.

The block below is an estimate to be validated against your plant's actual data. We put it forward so the committee has an order of magnitude; we refine it during the assessment.

• Estimated payback 5-10 months.
• Unattended night hours that become genuinely productive, because a stopped cycle is restarted in minutes instead of the next morning.
• A replacement CAPEX deferred indefinitely on a machine that still cuts well.
• And a process curve per detail, which is what lets the shop explain a finish instead of guessing at it.

estimated payback 5-10 months. Two levers: unattended machine hours that become genuinely productive, and a replacement CAPEX deferred indefinitely. *Estimate to validate*.

And the fair question from the production manager

"Can a camera really read a 20-year-old screen reliably?" — here the task is anchored: a fixed screen, fields in known positions and values within an expected physical range, where the best models drop below 1.5% error [1]. And the series is cleaned by a second net: a frame whose value falls outside the possible range for that machine is discarded rather than accepted, so a reflection or a flicker never becomes a false stoppage.

^[1] OpenAI paper "Why Language Models Hallucinate", 2025 — on the reliability of AI in anchored tasks.