Designing and building next generation automobiles takes careful planning, precision, highly detailed design tools, and extensive testing and re-testing of increasingly complex systems. Test engineers and technicians at DaimlerChrysler spend their days testing engines, braking and fuel systems, and transmission system components, generating test data on temperatures, pressures, and direction and speed of a vehicle. In the past, engineers would monitor one or two temperature channels or take 10 samples per second but as more and more automotive systems are being more precisely controlled by electronics, they need to be more precisely tested. These additional parameters in turn require more capacity for storage of test data. The bread and butter for DaimlerChrysler's Tech Center, home to several thousand engineers, is the laptop computer.
Laptops are convenient because they easily run off a car's power system and are very portable.
That data, however, can be vulnerable - a lost, stolen or damaged laptop could wipe out weeks or months of planning and work. With the large data files stored to a laptop's hard drive in a single day, DaimlerChrysler engineers quickly tap out a system's memory capacity, even with the size of hard drives today. That information could easily be stored on a desktop PC in a networked environment, but it presents significant challenges for users who need to be mobile. Even if they could, the corporate policy generally limits users to 20 MB of storage on the server. Mabry builds the test equipment that automotive engineers use to develop and evaluate new products at DaimlerChrysler.