I once spent six months working the hardest I've ever worked in my entire life with a mechanical engineer, two technicians, a machinist, and all of the supporting cast of procurement and scheduling to build a test fixture for a control board for a satellite.
There were four control boards per panel and four panels per satellite and a projected order of 12 satellites so were going to have over 200 boards (enough plus spares) to test and last go-around it took two days to test a single board with failures due to connector issues and I wanted to get that down to two boards per day and no failures.
It was my masterpiece. Place a board on the fixture, pull down an assembly, and six micro-D, two nano-D, MCU and FPGA programming connections, remote thermal and multimeter probes, and a canbus connection with onboard amplifier to traverse the absurdly long cable all slotted with perfect precision into the board and were routed back to a test rack via a single cable bundle. Automated test bench scripts powered on the board, took voltage measurements, programmed the devices, and ran a suite of tests automatically and then printed out a report with a signature block for me to sign at the end.
The board experienced no stress, every connector was mated with perfect force at the perfect angles, and it would cut down the amount of time needed to test the hundreds of boards we were going to build by months.
It was featured in marketing materials for my employer.
We built four of them and with all of the labor they probably cost a quarter million each but would put the program back on track as it was delayed.
Additional delays in another part of the program led to the government cancelling the entire thing and we turned over all of our tooling and prototypes to the customer who probably put my fixtures in a warehouse for fifteen years before selling them for scrap value.
There were four control boards per panel and four panels per satellite and a projected order of 12 satellites so were going to have over 200 boards (enough plus spares) to test and last go-around it took two days to test a single board with failures due to connector issues and I wanted to get that down to two boards per day and no failures.
It was my masterpiece. Place a board on the fixture, pull down an assembly, and six micro-D, two nano-D, MCU and FPGA programming connections, remote thermal and multimeter probes, and a canbus connection with onboard amplifier to traverse the absurdly long cable all slotted with perfect precision into the board and were routed back to a test rack via a single cable bundle. Automated test bench scripts powered on the board, took voltage measurements, programmed the devices, and ran a suite of tests automatically and then printed out a report with a signature block for me to sign at the end.
The board experienced no stress, every connector was mated with perfect force at the perfect angles, and it would cut down the amount of time needed to test the hundreds of boards we were going to build by months.
It was featured in marketing materials for my employer.
We built four of them and with all of the labor they probably cost a quarter million each but would put the program back on track as it was delayed.
Additional delays in another part of the program led to the government cancelling the entire thing and we turned over all of our tooling and prototypes to the customer who probably put my fixtures in a warehouse for fifteen years before selling them for scrap value.