Faultsmith

Read. Diagnose. Solve.

Created by a technician, for technicians

A service manual reader for generator technicians. Look up a fault and land on the test that fixes it — not on the page it happens to sit on. Works with no signal, on the manuals you already have.

See what it does Beta status

How a lookup runs

Illustration

On the controller

Low oil pressure

What the unit is telling you, and all it will tell you.

One tap

In Faultsmith

Oil Pressure Switch Test

opens at the heading — not the top of the page

The procedure itself, scrolled to where it actually begins.

The problem

A code on the display.
Three hundred pages in the way.

The manual has the answer. It also has the same table printed three times, page numbers that don't match the ones your PDF reader counts, and procedures that start two-thirds of the way down a page — under the tail end of the one before. Jump to the top of that page and you are reading the wrong test.

Faultsmith reads the whole manual once, when you import it, and remembers where everything actually is.

What it does

Built for the call you're on

Lookup

Faults, by number or by name

Type what the controller shows. A numbered code, or the plain-language alarm a unit displays when it has no numbers at all.

Anchoring

Lands on the test itself

A reference opens at the procedure's own heading, wherever it starts on the page — never part-way through the one before it.

Contents

A contents list the PDF never had

Sections, fault tables and multi-sheet drawings are found by reading the manual — including which sheet is 4 of 6.

Flow charts

Chart and test, both ways

Open a test from the chart that sent you to it, and get back to the chart when you have your reading. The way you actually work a fault.

Glossary

Wire and component lookup

What an abbreviation or a wire number stands for, and where to find it — searched in the manual you have open, not a different one.

Markup

Draw straight on the page

Trace a circuit through a schematic without leaving the manual. Your marks stay on the page you made them on.

Notes

Readings, stamped to the page

A pad that pops out mid-test for voltages and resistances, with photos of a nameplate or a burnt connector kept alongside.

Library

Search every manual at once

Not sure which book covers the unit in front of you? Search the whole library and get the manual, the page, and the line it was found on.

Who built it

Written on the truck,
not at a desk

Faultsmith is built by a working service technician — someone who does this job, on real equipment, in the conditions it gets done in. Not a software team who read about it.

That is the whole reason it behaves the way it does. Every decision in it came from a call that went badly: the code you couldn't find, the page that turned out to be the wrong test, the reading you wrote on your hand because there was nowhere else to put it. It gets used on jobs, and what doesn't hold up gets changed.

Offline by design

No signal. No account. No cloud.

The job happens in basements, crawl spaces and the back of a truck. An app that needs a connection is an app that fails exactly when you need it.

Everything on the device

Manuals, notes, markup and photos are stored locally. Nothing is uploaded, because there is nowhere to upload it to.

No sign-in

There are no accounts and no user data, so there is nothing to lose, leak or lock you out of.

Your manuals stay yours

Faultsmith ships no manufacturer's manuals. You import the PDFs you already have, and they never leave your device.

Status

In beta

Beta — iPad & iPhone

Faultsmith is in private testing on iPad and iPhone. It is not on the App Store yet.

It is being run against real service manuals — several hundred pages each, and no two laid out the same way — and fixed against what goes wrong on actual calls. If you service generators and want to try it, get in touch.