Field notes from IAA Mobility.

IAA Mobility is the kind of show that breaks anything new. Seventy thousand visitors, brutal lighting, RF saturation that would shame a stadium, and a customer that needs the press hit on day one.

We learned several things that will change how we ship the next one. The lighting envelope at the booth was 30% above what our calibration assumed; we now site-survey lux at peak hours. The CMS connection dropped twice during the press preview because of the booth's segregated VLAN; we now ship a redundant LTE bond.

And we learned, again, that the on-site crew matters more than any single piece of hardware. The senior engineer who slept four hours a night to keep the show running is the reason the program landed.