Grant Maloy Smith

Grant Maloy Smith has been in the test and measurement industry for 40+ years, starting as a technician in 1980 and working his way up as an application engineer, where he put together hundreds of solutions for companies like NASA, Ford Motor Company, and many more. He eventually founded the North American division of Dewetron, running it for 20 years until he retired in 2016. 

He has a broad range of experience with DAQ applications across the automotive, aerospace, power, and industrial sectors. Today, Grant applies his application knowledge and experience writing about data acquisition (DAQ) technology, both for clients and publications in the worlds of test and measurement and real-time controls.

Technical milestones

In the 1990s, Grant wrote software for Ford Motor company that allowed them to remotely control all of their Graphtec DAQ systems, resulting in much greater efficiency for the carmaker. This software was rolled out to thousands of customers worldwide.

In 2000, he developed the DAQ subsystem tribo-electric testing system that was used by NASA's Kennedy Space Center to test the electrostatic effects on a variety of materials, crucial to preventing ESD (electro-static discharge) in an oxygen-rich environment. He wrote the acquisition and analysis software and hosted it on an off-the-shelf DAQ system.

Grant was one of the three inventors of the first version of DewesoftX software, winning a technology innovation award from Slovenia in 2000.

​Grant created a completely integrated system for the cyclical testing of supermarket refrigerated cases for a major manufacturer in California, writing the software and integrating the precision temperature measurement hardware.​

Grant invented the first PC-based battery-powered instrument that could run without external power indefinitely, using a hot-swap Lithium-Ion battery scheme. His invention of the DA-130 with its SideHand battery system was awarded Product Of The Year by NASA Tech Briefs in 2006. This technology is still in use today.

Background

Grant started in the test and measurement industry in 1980, working as a technician for a maker of chart recorders. He became a sales and application engineer in 1983, an eastern regional sales manager in 1984, and was the company's first marketing manager in 1988. He was the director of marketing at Western Graphtec in California for five years before founding the US division of Dewetron in 1989. He was president and CEO of Dewetron, Inc. before selling the company and retiring.

In addition to his product development and application engineering activities, Grant ran the marketing departments at all of the companies mentioned above during some or all of his tenure there, creating ads, brochures, marketing materials, writing and presenting technical papers at trade shows and technical conferences, including the International Telemetering Conference, and more. He has written or been quoted in numerous industry magazines centered around test and measurement, metrology, scientific measuring instrumentation, and the test and measurement industry.