Tag: Test Stand Automation
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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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Five Signs Your Test Stand Is About to Cost You a Production Day
A test stand rarely fails on a schedule. It fails on a Tuesday, in the middle of a run, when you can least afford it. The good news is that most of them warn you first — and good test stand automation in Ohio starts with reading those warnings early. Here are five signs we’ve… 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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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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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… 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
