After the humidity of Townsville, the dry heat of Mount Isa’s 36 degrees was a welcome change. We arrived in Mount Isa early ready to undertake our fourth FatigueM8 installation, rather fittingly as it happens into a massive Quad Trailer road train, operated as one of 50 by Wagner’s Mount Isa operation that was our 4th installation.
These units really are road trains, with a length well over 50 Meters and weighting north of 120 tonnes, these beasts run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Noting that Mount Isa is at least a five (5) hour plane trip from our base in Canberra and leveraging our software quality assurance heritage after landing, we went through a final set of tests before heading out to site to complete the installation. A couple of tweaks and we were on our way.
Once on-site the installation process is pretty straight forward and took just shy of two (2) hours to complete. The end result is in one way, quite underwhelming, as the steering wheel cover just blends into the wheel and part from the coloured zip it’s hardly noticeable. The zip is a recent addition to the steering wheel cover and simplifies the installation (whilst not annoying the driver). The inclusion of the zip takes roughly an hour out of the installation time. We are interested to see how the zip based unit performs and what our drivers think of it, so watch this space.
The compute unit also blends in somewhat. The dashboard of the T659’s is quite a bit steer than the other trucks we’ve installed in and the result is that the compute unit is somewhat hidden. This isn’t a bad thing, in our original design back in 2018 we’d envisaged the compute unit being a black box hidden somewhere in the truck. Luckily the design of our front camera module is such that it was able to be adjusted to the perfect angle (thanks to our previous trial feedback).
The truck we installed the unit into was in for a service and I was relieved to see data starting to flow from the unit the next morning (albeit from the truck moving around the yard). This truck, and all the other rigs in Mount Isa run in a 24 hour operation, so we’re excited to see more data flowing in once it hits the road post service.
Next week we’re off to QLD installing more units, so be sure to check in again to see where we’ve been.
Stay save until next time.
