Not so Fast

It's a regular day. You're cruising along the highway when you notice a speed camera.

 

Not a problem. As usual you slow down a few kph (or mph), drive on past, and then boost back up to your regular cruising velocity.

 

A short while later there's another one. You might think that's odd, but you dutifully slow down regardless, and then pick it back up again.

 

A few weeks later you get mail. It's a speeding ticket. How did that happen? Weren't you careful?

 

Welcome to the world of speed cameras with plate recognition built in. There's a case to be made that we'll all be driven everywhere in autonomous vehicles within the next few years or decades, but for now police worldwide are still doing everything they can to catch people going too fast.

 

The first camera you passed didn't actually check your speed, it just recorded your plate and timestamped the event. The second camera didn't check your speed either - again, it simply recorded the plate and timestamped the event. A little math is used to figure out your average speed between the two cameras based on the time it took to get from one to another, and that's how the infringement is calculated.

 

A large international company in the traffic enforcement industry contacted us with a few extra requirements:

 

      We have systems being installed in cabinets where ambient temperatures can get to 50 or 60 C, compared to competitors that don’t go past 40, so we need a very robust industrial solution which Tekron delivers

 

We had the solution. The TTM 01-G with it's DIN rail mount and rugged design fits snugly into a roadside cabinet, and will keep accurate time even in scorching Middle Eastern heat. If the timestamping isn't right the results can easily be disputed, so it needs to be accurate. The more extreme levels of accuracy used in the power industry may not be needed here, so for us it's all about reliability. We throw in the extreme accuracy anyway. As part of that reliability, we can't rely on updates to make things work.

 

      Our customers are governments and the design gets frozen. Whatever is approved is expected to deliver for many years afterwards

 

With clocks installed in many countries and many remote locations, updating firmwares is often nearly impossible. Tekron's clocks need to work and work well from day one, without intervention or maintenance of any sort. So does it work?

 

      It’s proven to be a good reliable product

 

That's good enough for us. Take a closer look at the TTM 01-G here