Ni Teststand for use in a full automated line with a production tester

[Churlikj]

Does anyone have experience using testand to run a full automated test cell with continous testing. I have a project in which this company bassically built an in circuit tester witha a conveyor and motor drivin clam shell. I have used teststand in the past, but was wondering about ideas on this one. I really dont want to build a custom GUI and sequencer with LabView, I would rather do this with test stand. Any feedback would be appreciated.

[~jiggawax~]

What is your main concern?  Are you worried about up time?

If you code it right it should run well.  I wouldn't store too many results in memory.

[CharlieRodway]

Like Jigg said, my only concern would be how many results you are storing in memory.

I've run long production tests back-to-back and seen tests begin to slow down, but that was pre-TS2010 and the tests were managing a lot of data.

[Churlikj]

I am worried about the up time. Thankfully we arent storing much data.

One of main concerns is integration in with the board handler to automatically start the tests.

[Norbert_B]

There are a couple of ways to design an automated test start. Selection of the 'correct' way is depending on some key features like test time vs. line frequency (DUTs/time), developer knowledge and of course test system environment (e.g. connected databases, hardware, user interaction, ...).

I usually recommend two options:

1) Custom UI which uses IO Server to detect 'start test' situation (e.g. closed cover of tester when manually filled). That could be e.g. a digital trigger event which essentially presses as "Single Pass" test execution programmatically (TS button 'DoClick' method)

2) Customized Pre-UUT sequence which calls blocking into a code module which waits for the start event. This approach however requires more sophisticated planning for debugging/termination use-cases (e.g. using Termination Monitor in blocking call)