After leaving Statcon, I joined Barco. This is the same company where I got rejected initially in 2005 when I applied after completing my engineering. But this time, I was lucky, I could crack there written test as well as pass their face to face interviews.
Barco is a Belgium based MNC manufacturing Industrial projectors, video walls, medical displays, aircraft displays, rugged display for tanks, etc.
I joined Barco as a Test and Measurement Engineer, responsible for developing test automation solutions (a combination of hardware, firmware, software) for their production department.
In one of a big project, I was required to develop test automation solution for 2 KW power supply used in the projector, some of the test equipment used were:
- Digital Multimeter
- Oscilloscopes
- Signal Mux cards
- USB IOs cards
- Programmable AC/DC power supply
- AC/DC loads
All instruments and power supply was controlled via PC. A VB 6.0 software was developed which will run the test procedure (300 test points including waveform comparison) one step at a time, perform the test and log the results in the central remote database.Reason for full automation was to increase the test coverage and significantly improve the production of the number of boards in a day which was not possible with manual testing.A typical bench automation setup looks like as shown in the picture below. This was developed by me single-handedly. This project involved understanding the test procedure, instrument selection, interfacing the instruments, writing test automation software, report generation.
There were several other test automation projects I did in order to help the production department improve their productivity.
I worked there until Nov 2007 and learned about testing, how tests can be automated and how it significantly adds value in the production of high volume or high-value equipment.
NEXT (my work at Simpal Technologies)