Case Study: Building a Test System to Determine Root Cause of Field Failures

A customer has been receiving field failures and the root cause has been difficult to determine. They have ideas of what may be causing these failures and need a test system that can simulate the various conditions and monitor the Device Under Test (DUT) to assist in determining the root cause. The customer turned to DISTek to provide a bench-top setup that will control the DUT and measure multiple in-circuit test points for events that may be damaging field effect transistors (FET) along with recording FET case temperatures. Custom events have been defined by the customer and will trigger the system to capture pre and post-trigger data. The test system should also provide various loads to the output of the DUT.

So I’m an Employee Owner. Now What?

Early last year, I wrote in this space about my new title – “employee owner,” after DISTek founder Matt Dickinson decided to share a part of his company with his employees by forming an ESOP – an Employee Stock Ownership Plan.

I noted back then that my immediate responsibilities wouldn’t change, and from the standpoint of my day-to-day tasks, they really haven’t.

2016: A Year in Review

Here at DISTek we just competed our 24th full calendar year as a company, which means our 25th anniversary happens in 2017. We are excited to think about our future as we pass this milestone, but it is also healthy to step back and review what we did in 2016. We took some bumps and bruises along the way – as did many in the industries we serve – but we also had some exciting successes.

Part 2: Cognex LCD Vehicle Display Tester

Welcome back to the blog! Today, I will be talking about how to operate a Cognex smart camera via a LabVIEW program. The way I will be communicating with the camera is via TCP/IP. There are other potential ways to communicate with the camera from LabVIEW, but this was determined to be the best way, giving us the most control over the camera. I will walk through some basic terminology that is necessary to discuss building a Cognex vision test. Then, I will create and set up a vision test and finally, I will briefly describe how to program LabVIEW to send/receive information to the camera and to trigger an image acquisition.

Rubik’s Cube Secret: Algorithms Work

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Anyone who stops by my office will notice that I have many puzzles laying around my desk. There are blocks, rings, metal puzzles, wood puzzles, and my favorite, Rubik’s cubes of all sizes. I really enjoy the Rubik’s cube and it is often regarded as something only a few people are able to solve. To learn to solve this puzzle requires many hours of practice to reliably solve it every time.

MINExpo 2016: The Age of Autonomy

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As the summer ended and fall began, we made our way to Las Vegas to attend MINExpo International on September 26th – 28th. There were no signs of fall whether approaching in Sin City, but that was okay because all of the action was inside the {air conditioned} Las Vegas Convention Center. While the convention center is very large it was busting at the seams with 50 foot tall haul trucks with the ability to haul payloads over 400 tons!

Part 1: Cognex LCD Vehicle Display Tester

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As LCD vehicle displays have become more prevalent and versatile in both on- and off-highway, the time it takes to ensure proper display functionality after a software release has increased dramatically. It is not uncommon for displays to have 15, 20, or even 30 different screens, each of which having multiple sub-selections available. If you take into consideration different supported languages, the scope of the test grows dramatically. DISTek, as a company, is always attempting to define the future needs of customers in the off-highway industry, of which vehicle display testers are one of those needs.

Fall 2016 ISOBUS Plugfest Review

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Another successful AEF ISOBUS Plugfest is in the bag. You can check out some of my prior blog posts if you want more detail on what a Plugfest entails, but in short, it is a meetup of Ag electronics manufacturers to test their own equipment with other manufacturers’ equipment. This was a record-breaking Plugfest in terms of participation and it made for some challenges in getting enough time for all participants to test with other manufacturer’s products.

Part 2: Real-time on Raspberry pi

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As promised, here’s my Part Two blog posting regarding the raspberrry pi.

The default kernel in Raspbian Jesse, the latest release of the raspberry pi’s official OS, could use a tune-up before being fit for duty running time-sensitive machine controls. On a vanilla Linux kernel program, latencies depend on everything running on the system making consistent and punctual tasks difficult to guarantee. The RT PREEMPT patch is a popular fix for this problem. The patch converts Linux into a fully preempt-able RTOS. If you want to control physical processes with your pi, as I intend to in DISTek’s training curriculum update, this is the way to go. But how big of a difference does it make on a pi?

DISTek takes on Farm Progress Show 2016

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The 63rd annual Farm Progress Show was recently held in Boone, Iowa. Among the 100,000+ visitors, a few of the DISTek Integration employee-owners were there to check in on the industry and enjoy a day out in the field.