EEVblog Electronics Community Forum
Electronics => Projects, Designs, and Technical Stuff => Topic started by: guscrown on March 14, 2016, 06:22:59 pm
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I have a board I'm designing for a project at work, this board has several power rails (24V, 12V, 5V, 3.3V) and each rail is being passed through a MOSFET to cut-off supply to devices when the machine is "OFF". In my old job, there was a team that used TestStand with some "homebrew" jig for testing the boards (they were making many thousand board per day). I kind of remember they were using some kind of Pogopins, this pins would make contact with test points on the bottom side of the board and they would supply the necessary voltages to "TURN ON" the board, and then they would measure whatever power rail/singal they wanted.
I've looked at TI's website and the TestStand license is $5,000.00 which I'm OK with. But I don't know what I need to the Hardware side. I am guessing I need one of their DAQs, but they have too many options.
Anyone out there already doing this that could help out and point me in the right direction? :-//
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I have never used TestStand, but I do have some general observations about bed of nails testing.
The key to a lot of such things is to include a JTAG chain around everything that supports it on the board, then you write your test sequence as a set of jtag commands (Over here, www.xjtag.com (http://www.xjtag.com) seem to be the big player with the good dev tools and support at many assembly houses).
JTAG is fast and cheap if you have a few parts on the board that already support it, but you do usually need a few add ons to handle things like analogue rails and checking connectors if you want close to 100% test coverage. Sometimes a smallish programmable logic element that exists only to provide test access is actually worthwhile, and do try to make sure that memory clocks can all be gated by something in the jtag chain it makes testing connectivity to these parts very much easier.
Regards, Dan.
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Give your local NI sales guy a call and discuss with them.
NI kit is industry standard for large scale testing and Labview/TestStand is pretty comprehensive.
Without knowing your design in detail, I cannot recommend a good solution.
Bear in mind, NI gear isn't at the cheap end of the spectrum. But, they do have a range of products covering a wide range of applications.
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I have been designing an NI/LabVIEW system for automated test. The cost is not trivial, but I believe it will pay for itself fairly quickly in my case.
The estimated cost for my 'starter' system is well over $50k. I expect that if I go all in, it could be $100k. This is a combination of NI and 3rd party hardware along with various custom fixtures and training.
Sent from my horrible mobile....