Company Automates Quality Data Collection
TALtech's WinWedge Pro
Crest Industries serves a wide
variety of companies in the consumer and electronics industries.
It sells and services automation equipment--both electronic
and mechanical aspects--and its newest endeavor is producing
custom test equipment for the machines it services.
Managers at Crest were looking for software to interface
to a test instrument that measures the performance of mechanical-pneumatic
devices used on surface-mount chip replacement machines.
The tester, a stand-alone unit that records the various
parameters (e.g., speed and accuracy) to its own internal
memory, consists of multiple sensors, including displacement
and load and pressure sensors. It also includes a bar code
wand for reading the bar code on each part as it's being
tested. Crest turned to TALtech and its WinWedge software.
"WinWedge performed exactly as the ad said it would,"
notes Travis Perry, applications engineer. "It's transparent
to the user, yet it allows us to communicate with any Windows
program. We're very pleased with the software and its ease
of use."
Before using WinWedge, Crest experimented with various
simple serial communications programs to receive the data.
The company also considered using a hardware (keyboard)
wedge, but this proved too limiting for writing custom software
for the host PC.
The company decided on WinWedge because of its versatility
and the great time savings it would bring. WinWedge is used
as the communication link between the tester and application
programs. It's able to take readings from all the sensors
and the bar code scanner. The typical tester end-user can
keep track of the machine parameters through time as part
of a statistical quality control program. A spreadsheet
or database-type approach is an ideal way for users to track
the performance of the machine and to indicate when maintenance
is needed. Catching failures before they occur on the factory
floor saves both time and money.
To use this spreadsheet approach with Crest's stand-alone
tester, operators would have needed to write their own spreadsheet
and communications program for transferring information
from their tester to the host PC. WinWedge allows them to
communicate with any spreadsheet, database or SPC package.
This is particularly important when the customer already
has software in place.
"We're particularly pleased with the character-translation
abilities, both pre-input and pretransfer, because it allows
us to configure WinWedge to communicate with various databases
without changing our tester software," says Perry.
"We've saved different files for the types of software
we come in contact with, so we can immediately adapt our
product to the customer's needs. WinWedge's input record
structure was also very helpful in organizing the various
data fields and types for transfer to the host program.
To sum it up, the best part about the WinWedge was that
it allowed us to add serial communications to existing programs
which had no such ability."
TALtech's WinWedge Pro
- Simultaneous data collection from different instruments
- Cost savings from preventive maintenance
- Transparent to the end-user
- Adds serial communication to existing programs with
no such ability
www.taltech.com
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