by Judith C. Clark, President of SafetyWatch Technologies, Inc.
The thought of a SeeBrake system first emerged out of discussions with the fleet manager of a large Petroleum hauler who was tired of his trucks being pulled over, put out of service for brakes only to find they weren’t out of service (OOS). After battling it out in court, the tickets would be expunged. Yet the data resulting from his OOS remained in U.S. DOT’s data base. It was then pointed out to me that this bogus data would be used for DOT’s own purposes, mostly against the trucking industry. I was asked if there could be a brake pushrod reporting system developed.
An easy task given my networks, or so I thought. This was almost 1997.
The project went from electronic engineering that couldn’t do much with devising something at the brake which could report data. So I took the project to Los Alamos National Laboratory whose engineers couldn’t solve the problem, they brought in Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Missile Design Team who also failed.
With this 20 year history, the current team solved the problem coming up with the design that you see today. A rugged design meeting military spec’d component parts! The three original beta trucks had over 400,000 miles when the trucks themselves were retired from the fleet. Today’s long haul tractor-trailer has a bit over 600,000 real road miles as of October, 2018 and in all weather and road conditions. The system itself had no errors or failures that weren’t either man or environment-caused.
The following is why our component parts have held up for so long:
Electronics:
There are three grades of electronics. SWTI has opted for Military grade because of its broad temperature survivability and reliability. Below lists temperature ranges of each grade:
- Commercial: 32 degrees Fahrenheit to 158 degrees Fahrenheit
- Industrial: - 40 degrees Fahrenheit to 185 Fahrenheit
- Military: Minus - 67 degrees Fahrenheit to + 257 degrees Fahrenheit. Military Specification further tested to survive chemical road conditions, vibration, and strain.
SeeBrake survives in the tough environment at the brake because its component parts are manufactured to Military Specification Standards. They’re also produced by highly reliable manufacturers.
This Standard maximizes:
- Compatibility
- Interoperability
- Safety
- Repeatability
- Quality
- Commoditization
