The automotive industry is experiencing an incredible amount of innovation today, perhaps more than any other industry. This innovation will change the face of transportation as we know it. Automotive innovation will create new jobs and the industry will employ more and more design engineers. How are the members of the element14 Community participating in this rise of automotive innovation? That's the question posed this month.
I did a lot of automotive work between about 1980 and 2000 when I was Technical Director of Lamerholm Fleming Ltd.
Designed a piezo electric knock sensor (sold mainly to Austin Rover - about 2.5e6 made altogether).
Then an adaptive suspension controller for Rolls Royce Motors (before they were sold off by Vickers to BMW and VW).
We did a little fun side job for RRM: it was a bidirectional CAN spoofer that enabled a BMW air con control system to talk to a Mercedes rear air conditioning module which was fitted to a stretched Limo type car that they made about 100 a year of. The translation box was way smarter than either of the controllers because it didn't just need to translate messages but also to warp the data to fool the two boxes into doing the right thing. It had a graphical control interface (written in Visual Basic) that allowed you to tune the data warping while it was running.
We also did a lot of development work with Ford in the UK and designed an LF piezo electric accelerometer for them as well as sundry data collection systems and experimental suspension controllers.
On the left, VP50 piezo electric knock sensor, Lamerholm Fleming's first (and only) million+ selling product. On the right, the LF piezo electric accelerometer made for FMC (had built in amplifiers and filters).
By 2000 the reluctance of the big auto companies to work with small companies meant that we had pretty much moved out of that business altogether.
After I left in 2001 I did do a bit of automotive work for a company that made production test systems for a variety of automotive components.
I don't do any automotive stuff now and I don't much like the way the industry has evolved - I suspect the opportunities for things like our spoofing box are long gone 
MK
