The project that launched Redmer Controls — and A1SI's automotive pedigree.

On the line

Every seat that shipped, tested before it left the plant.

Every Mustang and Lincoln Town Car seat that came off the Ford assembly line went through one of these End-of-Line Seat Testers before it left the plant. Operators rolled the trim seats onto a carrier, docked the carrier at a test station, and the rig exercised every motor, every switch, every sensor in the seat — looking for wiring shorts, motor stalls, heater-element failures, and (after 2001) cooling-blower faults. A pass ran ~30 seconds; a fail rejected the unit before it became somebody's warranty problem six months later. The DOS / FoxPro / Watcom-C stack lived under that operator UI from 1997 forward and was extended in place through 2005.

• End-of-line functional testingEvery motor (recline, slide, lumbar, tilt), every switch (heater, memory presets), every sensor in every seat got exercised at the test station before the seat left the plant. Pass/fail in ~30 seconds, captured to the operator log so a warranty return six months later could be traced back to the build.
• Custom wiring-harness validationThe tester docked the seat's wiring harness through a custom backplane (one per seat variant) and exercised each circuit individually. Open circuits, shorts to ground, wrong-color crimps — the tester caught them all before the seat got bolted into the customer's car on the assembly line.
• Heating & cooling systems (Redmer Controls, 2001+)When Ford contracted Redmer Controls in 2001 to build the next generation of testers, the new rigs added heating- and cooling-system validation — the first automotive seat program where the tester verified both heat and active cooling on every unit before it shipped. Heater elements got an inrush + steady-state load test; coolers got a blower-current + plenum-airflow check.
• Barcoded serial-number traceabilityEvery seat the line tested carried a barcoded serial number tied through the FoxPro database to the test record, the test timestamp, the operator on shift, and the pass/fail result. The traceability discipline that flowed forward into the ATEC EPROM Programmer (2006–2007) and ultimately into A1SI's current 21 CFR Part 11 audit work started here.
• DOS · FoxPro · Watcom CDOS 6.22 + FoxPro 2.6 for the operator forms and the test-record database; Watcom C/C++ 11 for the hardware-driver layer that talked to the data-acquisition cards, the relay banks, the analog-input multiplexers, and the barcode-reader RS-232 lines. The stack ran on Industrial Pentium boxes that lived in dust- and oil-tolerant cabinets on the assembly floor.
• A long-lived code lineageThe 1992 code base, the 1997 Motorola productization, the 1998 Ford direct-contract maintenance + heating-pad extension, and the 2001 Redmer Controls heating-and-cooling overhaul all share the same operator UI and the same FoxPro database schema. The line never had to retrain; the codebase grew with the production-line capability, not against it.