Off To A Bad Start

Heh. I half expected these boxes to do some weird shit during vibration testing, but I had no idea they would be this flimsy and worthless. After working on older generation instruments designed back in the 1970s through to the early 1990s for the past few years I became used to the fact that our stuff was rock solid. Mechanically our products were so rugged that US Marines dug into a hole in the ground could use our boxes while being shelled by artillery and the shit would hold up perfectly. The Marines gave us many compliments on that kind of quality workmanship. Somehow I think they are going to be mighty disappointed in our current generation of gear. You can practically sneeze on these units and watch them go belly up.

Okay. So the instruments I’m putting through shock and vibration have custom made black and white backlit display screens. Under random vibration testing many of the units have rapidly imploded and one of the common things I’m observing is the monochrome display screens are suddenly showing me brilliant colors, which shouldn’t be possible. The screen will go blank and then instantly display what looks like a UPC bar code in pretty orange and red hues. Occasionally I’ll see a nice yellow color too. It’s swell. When this occurs the system has died. There is no way to recover.

Other problems include the power supply shutting down. The unit is killed when something grounds out and the power supply automatically senses the short. We don’t know where the contact points are yet but I suspect more than likely it’s the outer instrument case making a connection with a live component or circuit trace somewhere on the motherboard. There could be some flexing of the instrument sub-frame as well which may be making a connection on a PC board in the card cage. Another thing to consider is the power supplies are flaky. We’re buying those pre-built from a subcontractor now too and so far the quality on their builds has been very poor. Maybe the power supply itself is shorting out.

~ by factorypeasant on July 17, 2006.