The COVID-19 pandemic has changed a lot in our daily lives, both at work and home. It’s forced us to adapt and adjust in major and minor ways, regardless of job or industry. In this post, we’re taking a look at the life of an automotive calibration engineer.
| Before COVID-19 | Current/during COVID-19 |
| Multiple cars at your disposal to drive and collect data | Test cars sitting static in company parking lots |
| Easy, quick and daily collaboration with colleagues | Scheduled, virtual meetings/calls with colleagues; on-demand “chats” |
| Instant access to your company’s server for the latest vehicle test data | Working from home with old vehicle data |
| A test track to collect data from required drive cycles | Use of public roads to collect data from limited drive cycles |
| The ability to gather additional data from a test vehicle during your daily commute | You have a test vehicle at home, but limited commutes to gather data |
“In the midst of every crisis lies great opportunity.” – Albert Einstein
Sometimes it takes a crisis to make improvement. This is true for the calibration engineer who has been forced to alter processes and, likely, faces challenges to get the job done. ETAS is a single source for solutions to change the way calibration engineers work without giving up their pre-COVID “benefits.” How? By fully leveraging existing people, vehicles and data resources through Distributed Calibration Development. This approach allows a company to leverage one vehicle and just one driver to gather all the needed data and then distribute it to the calibration engineers wherever they are working.
Distributed Calibration Development, offered exclusively by ETAS, enables the efficient use of existing people and vehicle resources regardless of the work-from-home situation and reduces or eliminates travel for calibration engineers.
There is a Better Way – Distributed Calibration Development
And, we have saved the best for last, you likely already have some of the tools required to enable the new methodology.
Tools of the Trade for Distributed Calibration Development
ETAS’ Guided Calibration and Automation Software (INCA-FLOW) allows for automated and repeatable tests or someone else performing the tests for you. A revolutionary approach to automating and guiding the calibration of ECUs, INCA-FLOW facilitates the graphical specification of calibration procedures without requiring programming skills. Benefits include:
- Calibration engineers can focus on creating calibration and analysis tasks
- Drive cycles are utilized to reduce data analysis and overall development time
- Automated tests guide drivers to drive vehicles on specified routes/tests, providing more reliable test drives
- More accurate data collection from repeatable tests
Utilizing your colleague’s vehicle while they are driving it, having updated data and being able to easily access the data in the cloud or your company’s server are enabled by ETAS’ Drive Recorder Module (ES820). This device captures and records signals from the vehicle’s ECUs, buses, networks, sensors and measuring instruments without user or driver interaction. The ES820 also:
- Runs INCA, so your INCA experiment is easily transferable to the drive recorder
- Makes data collection available to you and your colleagues during the same drive cycle – measuring multiple variables in parallel, sequential experiment execution, and multiple recordings
- Allows recorded data to be easily sent and retrieved from your company server or the cloud
- Focuses the use of vehicles on data capture, not experiment set-up
Want to ensure the data you collected is what you need but don’t want to waste countless minutes waiting for your large data files to load or scroll? The ETAS Measure Data Analyzer (MDA) V8 is a measurement data analysis tool that allows users to visualize, further process analyze and document data. Additional benefits include:
- Calibration engineers can focus on analysis tasks
- Seamlessly integrates with INCA
- Exceptionally fast load times of files
- Powerful analysis instruments
- An intuitive user experience
If you are looking for a more in-depth analysis, the ETAS Enterprise Data Analytics Toolbox (EATB) will quickly identify key points in vast sets of measured data, and performs statistical analyses and generates reports with compelling graphics. It also:
- Reduces the time to pinpoint problematic issues
- Bridges the gap between engineers
- Helps end-users complete the investigation and validation with predefined criteria and/or performance specifications
- Allows for immediate and interactive reporting to use in presentations for management or customers
- Is MATLAB based, providing maximum flexibility to help end-users turn valuable test data into actionable insights
Change is upon us, but with the right solutions and mindset, calibration engineers can use this change to benefit their work, company and customers. Want more information on how ETAS’ Distributed Calibration Development can help improve your calibration process to be more efficient? We’d love to help – contact us.
