For the past 6 months, the NSE Design Office has been working with 3 students from the ESISAR engineering school in Valence (France) to develop a new internal tool: a generic test bench. At the end of June, the students passed their industrial project defense and provided the NSE team with the final deliverables and documentation.
This project is NSE's take on a generic test bench that will allow testing of equipment that NSE developpes (complete products or sub-assemblies), and programmed specifically for each product. The objective is to make it available to the design office, production teams and our suppliers to be able to test our products. For example we could test electronic circuit boards as soon as they leave production and validate them before they enter the NSE stock.
With this test bench, via scripts and programs, many different products and sub-assemblies can be tested. The system can drive any type of power supply, multimeter, load, oscilloscope, etc., transparently for the user without having to develop specific scripts for each device and regardless of their communication protocols. The test bench will make it possible to reduce and automate the validation time as well as to limit errors and variability during tests.
This generic test bench will first be deployed as part of an ongoing strategic project at NSE Soyons with a subcontractor of assembled boards in order to test them before delivery to NSE. At the end of production, the bench will be returned to NSE to be used on other projects. Eventually, several test benches could be deployed, for example among frequent suppliers.
A great collaboration that is continuing with a summer internship of one of the students who worked on the test bench.
Written by Jeremy Lopes, Design and Innovation Manager
See also: « Deploying our ability to anticipate & innovate: Interview of Jeremy Lopes » https://www.nse-groupe.com/en/2022/02/25/deploying-our-ability-to-anticipate-innovate/
