Background
Porticos worked with partner Raytheon to design a digital video recorder (DVR).
Challenges
When you put a DVR in the trunk of a police car, you don’t need it to be pretty. You do need it to survive extreme temperatures, moisture, vibrations, and high-speed collisions.
Porticos accomplished this rugged design and, using machined housings, held tooling costs at an absolute minimum as requested by the client.
The most significant challenge, however, turned out to be temperature extremes. To ensure the device would function perfectly in both an Arizona summer and a Montana winter, Porticos incorporated a heating element and convective cooling system that JPS programmers were able to control based on ambient temperature. Thermal finite element analysis (FEA) allowed us to find hot spots and engineer the product to conduct heat away from sensitive components.
