One of the projects I had most control over at Active Shock was a major redesign of our steering sensor component. To predict vehicle body roll, several vehicles contained a steering angle sensor mounted to the steering column under the hood, but on one truck, these sensors were being returned to us covered in dust and destroyed. To find the root cause of the problem, I built an environmental tester that periodically sprayed a mud slurry on three sensors to simulate dirty off-road conditions and submerged them to mimic river fording, all while moving the sensors through the exact motions they underwent during vehicle testing at a proving ground. Sand was able to bypass the seals in the sensor and lock the gears, so I completely redesigned the sensor to use a non-contacting hall effect encoder encased in a smooth, overmolded urethane casting that was robust to dirt up to 1/16″ and contained half as many parts as the old assembly. When I ran the sensors in the environmental tester, they had no problems with the harsh conditions.