Software speeds quality data acquisition

Crest Industries uses WinWedge Pro to interface to a test instrument used to measure the performance of mechanical-pneumatic devices used on surface mount chip placement machines.

Crest industries, has been in business since 1991 serving a wide variety of companies in the consumer electronics industries.

They sell and service industrial automation equipment, both electronic and mechanical aspects.

The company's newest area is in the production of custom test equipment for the machines it services.

Crest Industries uses WinWedge Pro to interface to a test instrument used to measure the performance of mechanical-pneumatic devices used on surface mount chip placement machines.

The tester is a stand-alone unit which records the various parameters (such as speed and accuracy) to its own internal memory.

The tester consists of multiple sensors, including displacement, load and pressure sensors, and it also includes a bar code wand for reading the bar code on each part as it is being tested.

WinWedge is used as the communication link between the tester and application programs.

It is able to take data readings from all the sensors and also the bar code scanner.

Before using WinWedge the company experimented with various simple serial communications programs to receive the data.

Crest also considered using a hardware (keyboard) wedge but this was too limited, or even writing its own custom software for the host PC.

The company decided on WinWedge due to its versatility and the great savings in time that it would bring.

The typical end-user of their tester wanted to 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 its stand-alone tester the company would have needed to write its own spreadsheet and communications program for transferring this information from the tester to the host PC.

The Wedge allows it to communicate with any spreadsheet, database or SPC package.

This is particularly important when the customer already has software in place.

WinWedge makes the tester product much more universal and attractive.

This is what Travis Perry, Applications Engineer, had to say about the performance of WinWedge: "WinWedge performed exactly as the ad said it would.

It is transparent to the user, and yet allows us to communicate with any Windows program.

We are very pleased with the software and its ease of use".

"We are particularly pleased with the character translation abilities, both pre-input and pre-transfer, because it allows us to configure the Wedge to communicate with various databases without a change in our tester software.

We have saved different config files for the types of software we come in contact with, so we can immediately adapt our product to the customer's needs, whatever they may be.

The input record structure was also very helpful in keeping the various data fields and types in order for transfer to the host program".

"And finally, we would be happy to recommend WinWedge to anyone with a unique serial communications problem, or virtually any application using serial transfer into already existing programs.

To sum it up, the best part about the Wedge was it allowed us to add serial communications to existing programs which had no such ability".

WinWedge is supplied and supported in the UK and Ireland by Adept Scientific.

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