DFT, small series testing, JTAGs

[DominicusPlatus]

Hi

Recently I have been researching available solutions for testing finished assembled boards. I'm aware of the >kk$ tools used by fabs, my interest are the possibilities available for relatively low cost.
For digital, JTAG can take care of large portion of interconnect tests. The problem persists on software level, the open source project 'goJTAG' has been removed. The app works nice, but the support only scanner of sponsoring company.
For commercial solutions, the 'TopJTAG' supports the FTDI based scanners and JLINK, but is not a free solution, and very limited in software in terms of automation ( closed source , no API ).
The other commercial grade level solutions like XJTAG and Nebula or Corellis, have some more capabilities, but again, the price.

Taking into consideration that all the analysis is done on the host software, as a software engineer I'm tempted to start a open-source solution, at start for basic discovery, chain analysis and bsdl parsing, most importantly, possible to automate.

Now the analog part. The commercial tools have awesome capabilities, but they all use custom very expensive hardware and are designed for rather large batches.
To clarify, this solution is supposed to be handled by operator testing the board, by applying instrument probes to test points, and the running then  tests which evaluate the results against test definitions for pass/fail.
So I came up with an idea of simple testing app, which loads the test definitions from file ( cvs for start - easy copy paste from other docs ) and allows running those tests using hardware with programmable interfaces. For now, the following are used :
- Programmable DC supplies - RS232
- Programmable multimeters - RS232
- Oscillscopes - USB ( PicoScope )

This allows relatively easy for running test such as :
- DC - min-max check ( Scope/Multimeter )
- AC - amplitude
- Frequency range ( limited by scope bandwidth )
- Current consumption ( Programmable supply )

In the future more devices could be added. I have considered adding NI-VISA, but I have all but bad experience with their software stack, will leave that for future dev.

 I have created repositories with initial structure :
https://github.com/dominicusplatus/sconnTester
https://github.com/dominicusplatus/sconnJTAG

In the following weeks I plan to push the projects to fully operational state, to be able to test my boards after production. I invite everyone for collaboration.

Has any one got a better idea for this ? Meaby I have missed something and there are existing tools which are open source, please correct me if I'm wrong on this one.