Trawick Luxury Coaches

I learned so much during my time at Trawick Luxury Coaches.

When I first started, Trawick Luxury Coaches was a new company, and I was just keying in data into an outlook database to help keep track of customers. As time passed and the company gained traction, I have taken on new roles to help the company grow in many areas.

Audio/Video Technician

As my education provided me more academic knowledge, I applied it in practice when working on these complex, highly technical houses on wheels. During my time as an Audio/Video technician, I learned how A/V components are interconnected; how they communicate with each other ; and how valuable standards can be in many areas of technology. When I started I could connect a TV and secondary components such as satellites and blu ray players, but now I can spec full multi-zone audio video systems with state of the art technologies, wire everything up, and write the control software that binds them all together and makes it seamless for the end user.

Electrical Repair Technician

Having a computer engineering background in my academic career has opened so many doors for me at work. Working on used coaches that were built anywhere from last year to twenty years ago has given me great insight about where technology has been and where it’s going. I have seen all manner of ways of implementing the same kinds of electronics across many manufacturers and I have used that knowledge to inform the way I design and build my own projects.

A bus has many complex interconnected systems for things like audio/video, lighting control, hvac control, and even industrial grade PLC based automation systems that manage the coach systems in the background. All these interconnected systems are nice when they work, but can cause major issues when they don’t.

Here is one such example:

Coaches have onboard generators to run everything when not connected to shore power. Some companies choose to have dedicated hardware to monitor the incoming power and automatically start the generator when the shore power drops out so that the user needn’t be concerned with it. Other companies choose to integrate the monitoring with the audio/video control system so that a higher level of integration can be reached. What happens when the integrated system has an issue? You can’t use an off the shelf replacement because the replacement needs to be able to communicate with other systems in order for everything to work without errors. Adding even further difficulty to the issue, the company who produced the original part is no longer in business and replacement parts cannot be found. In this case, one must make their own replacement part, and that’s exactly what I did.

In this case, the Crestron audio/video control system used a volt-meter that communicated over RS-232 to monitor the status of the batteries and start the generator once they were depleted. The original meter was showing signs of erratic behavior and thus would not reliably compel the generator to start before the batteries got too low to operate. Created by a company that was no longer in business, acquiring a replacement was not an option. For this reason, development of a replacement was necessary. Using analysis hardware and software, the protocol that this particular device used was reverse engineered and tested to make sure the replacement could be viable. Once confirmed, a micro controller with an I2C analog-to-digital converter was programmed to read this voltage and send it over the RS-232 physical layer to the control processor, thus restoring reliable automatic start functionality of the generator.

Although this is one example, this (and projects like it) has been my primary focus at Trawick Luxury Coaches over the last six years.