There's an app for maintenance and reliability professionals

Technological advances are making life easier as well as establishing the environment in which people are expected, perhaps forced, to be a lot more productive than they would be otherwise. So, I'm going to jump on the bandwagon and add my potential burden to your backpack.

Smart phones of every stripe can be loaded with apps that seem to be able to do everything except wash dishes. Apps for the Android phone are numerous. I went through a list of them and found some that might be of value to the maintenance and reliability professional out there in the industrial world. Below is a culled list you might wish to explore.

Glossary of handyman terminology

3D graphing

Map received WiFi access points

Map of the devices on your LAN

Business scanner with OCR

Data for science students

Fire extinguisher inspection data collector

Two-phase motor calculations

Exact atomic time

Wood beam/joist calculator

Calculations and codes for electrical systems

NEMA motor dimensions

Satellite dish alignment

ixMAT barcode scanner

Barcode scanner

Password manager

Inclinometer/level gauge

Spirit level emulator

Magnetic compass

Simple Stopwatch

Stopwatch (perhaps better?)

Scan a document into a PDF

Sizing HVAC ducts

IP Address calculator for network engineers for CIDR networks

MODBUS simulator

I’d guess that some of you have similarly cool Android apps that have some rational relationship to industrial maintenance and plant management. If so, I’d sure like to know about them. Maybe we can push additional work on some of your peers as a way to level the playing field.

By the way, soon you’ll be seeing here a list of apps for the iPhone.