The Road to DAS-882 and a Quick Look Back

Image generated with OpenAI’s DALL·E.

About Me and the Company I Worked For

I’m an electrical and computer engineer. For 10 years, I worked at a company that manufactured complete Roller Brake Tester (RBT) systems. I was involved in production, on-site installations and support, and system upgrades, often traveled and worked in the field. I never shied away from getting my hands dirty installing systems, maintaining them, and even debugging firmware issues on-site in the middle of winter, inside a garage at -2 °C, with a laptop screen that kept shutting off from the cold 💻🥶

As a company, we supported all kinds of customers - from those with deeper pockets who wanted full new installations, to others who had found a set of old, rusty rollers somewhere, converted part of their house into a garage, and decided to build their business from that point.

During my early years with the company, I became intimately familiar with the weaknesses of the RBT system we were building, and that’s what sparked my decision, many years ago, to redesign it from scratch.

After all those years and the wide range of experience I gained, I can confidently say I’ve developed a deep understanding and solid expertise in everything related to Roller Brake Testers and vehicle inspection technology in general.

Rebuilding the Old RBT and Creating the DAS-882 Board

The first Roller Brake Tester redesign I built over 18 years ago has since proven to be a reliable, rock-solid performer in real-world vehicle testing environments.

Back then, the system was based on through-hole components mounted on a large PCB with thick copper tracks. I used a legacy company-licensed EDA tool called Protel - likely one of the first versions running on Windows. An even earlier version I worked with ran on MS-DOS and was powered by a Hercules graphics card. That was actually the first PCB design tool I ever used 😊.

The idea of modernizing this project isn’t new, it had been on my mind for some time. Back then, through-hole components made perfect sense. Swapping out a faulty chip in a socket was quick, easy, and affordable. But times have changed. Many of those components are now discontinued, hard to source, and only available from dwindling old stock - often at inflated prices. Some modules were even built as separate units like the infrared remote receiver and the inductive proximity sensor controller, partly due to legacy requirements carried over from even older designs.

So I’ve chosen to give this project a second life, with a fresh design and a few key goals in mind:

1. Legacy Considerations

   Old supporting PC software is still available and in use, so one of the key requirements in the redesign was to preserve compatibility with certain legacy elements.

2. Peripheral Compatibility

   While the electronics have been redesigned, all existing peripherals already installed including inductive proximity sensors, load cells, pressure transducers, electric motor control, and communication interface remain fully compatible with the new system.

3. Design Simplicity

   The new design should be as simple as possible, built around a single, significantly smaller PCB, a single microcontroller, and almost entirely composed of SMD components to simplify assembly and improve reliability.

4. Cost Efficiency

   Manufacturing the new design should be cost-effective, ideally at least three times as affordable as the older design, without compromising functionality or compatibility.

I named it DAS-882, short for Data Acquisition System with 8 analog inputs, 8 digital inputs, and 2 power outputs.

The DAS-882 platform is currently under active R&D development as part of the Braketrax project. Field validation across heterogeneous legacy roller brake tester installations is the current research objective. Follow this blog for updates.

Stay tuned!