Airios designs and manufactures products for home comfort such as thermostats, climate control and ventilation systems. All Airios products must be programmed and functionally tested before they are sent to the customer.
A test system consists of a test cabinet and a fixture for the PCB. The fixture is a system where the PCB is placed on a pin bed so that correct contacts are made with different test pads. The fixture is connected to the test box with one connector. The cabinet consists of a standard PC, controllable power supplies, an Agilent multifunctional switch / test unit, a spectrum analyzer, an Atmel programmer and Airios communication equipment.
Airios has 5 identical test cabinets and a number of product-specific fixtures. Each fixture can be connected to any of the five test cabinets.
VI Technologies implemented a software framework in NI TestStand and combined this with a driver layer in LabVIEW. With this combination Airios was able to test all products on all test systems.
The heart of the software on the test systems is National Instruments TestStand. The sequences used to test the products are created using the sequence editor that comes standard with TestStand. These sequences are executed in the TestStand Sequence Editor during development. During production, these are carried out on a TestStand Operator Interface adapted for Airios.
User management, database logging and reporting are included with NI TestStand and are configured to Airios' needs. A central database is used to store test and configuration data and is also used during production to display statistical information about the current running batch of products. These results are important input for optimizing production and can be displayed on any desktop PC (or as a standalone application on the test stations) using the analysis tool created in LabVIEW.
A selection of projects in which we played a major role
