imc LINK—Mobile Applications

When faced with the need for mobile testing, and travelling with the vehicle or object under test is either impractical or inconvenient, engineers must contend with the uncertainly of inaccessible data systems. Anxious for status and results, questions will arise:

• How soon can I get my data?
• Where is my test object at the moment?
• Is everything OK with the measurement?
• What have we learned so far?

Every imc data acquisition system is already equipped for standalone operation, including a variety of onboard storage options, and is well matched to the demands of the mobile test environment. imc LINK, and a 3rd party network interface appropriate to your needs (WLAN, Wi-Fi, 3G/4G Modem, …), enhances this standalone nature by helping you to manage the collected data.

With the help of collected position information , such as GPS coordinates, you can always know the route your test object has taken. Overlaying this position information on a map of your choosing in imc’s “map view” and linking positions to other measured values, provides an easily understood correlation of position and other signals particular to your test. imc LINK helps you manage this information flow, even downloading your data overnight, or whenever the data acquisition system is in wireless range.

imc LINK for fleet tests

When faced with tens, or hundreds, of measurement systems all collecting independent data, manual data transfer would be tedious at best—expensive or practically impossible as a worst case. imc LINK provides a tremendous efficiency gain and cost savings for retrieving and managing all this data.

imc LINK can communicate with either individual devices or device groups via any modern telecommunication connection. Furthermore, with automatic analysis and reporting provided by imc FAMOS, imc LINK can ensure the drudgery of test data management is kept to a minimum.

Automatic data transfer and automatic data analysis make imc LINK an indispensible tool for the “fleet testing” stage of new vehicle and new component development.

"Home Base" data transfer for vehicles

In the ideal case, we would all want instantaneous real time access to all of our data. With modern 3G/4G cellular networks, or satellite data networks, this is virtually possible, albeit at a very high cost. In cases where short term buffering of data is tolerable, far more cost effective solutions are possible—and imc LINK can help manage this data transfer.

Regardless of the type of vehicle—aircraft, marine, or land based—sooner or later it returns to its "home base". After service, trains return to the station or depot, ships enter a harbor or port, planes return to the hangar, and test cars are driven to a garage. This “home zone” is an ideal base station for low cost Wireless LAN data transfer.

With imc LINK, as soon as the device comes into wireless range, the measurement data will automatically be transferred from the device's hard disk to the imc LINK PC. Once copied and verified, the imc data acquisition system’s storage device (flash or hard disk) can be cleared, providing disk space for tomorrow’s test data.

imc LINK will then process the data using imc FAMOS scripts and/or move the data to permanent storage on a company network drive, automatically.