Tag: Data Acquisition
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Why Sensors Send 4 to 20 mA Instead of a Voltage
Industrial sensors almost always send a 4-20 mA current loop instead of a voltage. It holds up over long cable runs, ignores noise from motors and drives, and a reading of 0 mA tells you a wire is broken. Read more
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Scaling a Test Lab: From One Working Bench to Many Identical Stations
The first bench is the easy part. An engineer on your team builds a proof-of-concept test rig on a workbench in the corner. It reads the right sensors, drives the part through its sequence, and spits out a pass or fail. Everyone is happy. Then production planning does the math on takt time and volume,… Read more
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What a Data Acquisition System Actually Does — and When Off-the-Shelf Isn’t Enough
Most manufacturing and product-development teams eventually reach a point where the measurements they care about outgrow a handful of gauges and a spreadsheet. That’s usually the moment someone raises the idea of a custom data acquisition system — and it’s worth being clear about what that actually means before you spend money on one. A… Read more
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When the Auditor Asks for One Test Record, Can You Find It in Five Minutes?
Picture the afternoon a big customer schedules an audit. The email lands, and the first worry usually isn’t whether the parts passed. It’s whether anybody can actually put their hands on the proof. Then comes the quiet scramble: someone walking the floor with a USB stick, copying folders off test stands, squinting at file names… Read more
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Fast to the Target, Steady at the Center: Two-Loop Flow Control on a Water Heater Test Stand
On a water-heater test, the flow rate going into the unit is the whole ballgame. The test standard specifies it to a tight tolerance, and if the flow isn’t sitting in that band, the run doesn’t count, no matter how good the rest of your instrumentation is. That puts the flow controller in an awkward… Read more
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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… Read more
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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… Read more
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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,… Read more
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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… Read more
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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… Read more
