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How We Convinced a Transmission It Was in a Running Vehicle
Here’s a fun one. A transmission controller sitting on a test bench is a suspicious thing. It won’t shift the way it does in a real vehicle unless it’s convinced it is in a real vehicle — engine running, sensors live, the whole electrical world around it behaving normally. Get any of that wrong and…
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When Manual Testing Can’t Keep Up: Moving From Spreadsheets to Automated Test Stands
There’s a moment a lot of manufacturing and product-development teams hit without seeing it coming. Production ramps, a new variant gets added, or a customer asks for full traceability, and suddenly the way you’ve always tested, an operator with a handheld meter, a clipboard, and a shared spreadsheet, can’t keep pace. The line is faster…
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Your Test Stand Can’t Hear the ECU: Integrating CAN Bus Data into Automated Testing
Here’s a scene that plays out in a lot of test labs. The test stand itself works fine — thermocouples, pressure transducers, flow meters, all logging cleanly. But the unit under test isn’t just a mechanical device anymore. It has a controller on board, and the most interesting numbers — commanded operating point, internal temperatures,…
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When Your Test Stand Lies: Fixing False Failures and Escapes at End-of-Line
There’s a moment every plant manager and quality engineer dreads: a pallet of finished product sitting in quarantine because the end-of-line tester failed half of it — and nobody is sure whether the parts are bad or the tester is. Meanwhile, operators have quietly developed a workaround culture: “just run it again, it usually passes…
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The Test Stand That Outlived Its Engineer: A Practical Guide to Modernizing Aging Test Systems
There’s a machine like this in a lot of plants. It sits at the end of the line, it has tested every unit that shipped for the last ten or fifteen years, and everyone has quietly agreed on one rule: don’t touch that PC. The test stand still works — mostly. But the computer runs…
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AI Is Coming to LabVIEW. Here’s What We’re Watching — and Asking.
By Joe Zarycki If you build or maintain automated test equipment, the biggest LabVIEW news in years landed in 2026. Emerson, which now owns NI, released the LabVIEW+ Suite 2026 Q1 in February with AI-powered code completion, then announced at NI Connect 2026 that its Nigel AI technology will extend across the whole NI software…
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Back at it: custom automated test systems, and what’s coming next
I’ve been quiet on here for a while — time to fix that. I run Dynamic Engineering LLC, where I build custom automated test systems for manufacturers: LabVIEW, cRIO/cDAQ data acquisition, PLC integration, and complete test stands from fixture to final report. The projects I enjoy most are the ones where a manual test that…
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🔍 Unlocking the Secrets of Wordle: A LabVIEW Adventure! 🕵️♂️
Ever thought about using LabVIEW to decode the Wordle mystery? Well, why not? LabVIEW excels at swiftly prototyping intricate systems, making it an ideal tool for such tasks.
