Instrumental Hardware Development Stories: November 2017

As former hardware engineers ourselves, nothing delights us more than witnessing the wins our customers have on their new product development journeys. See for yourself in these three mini-success stories from our customers in the past month.

A new customer in early development

While reviewing images in the Instrumental application for the first time two days after deployment, an engineer used Detect and discovered a unit where the main PCB was not sitting flat. Zooming in, the image revealed the issue: two hand solder joints had excess solder — and while they were crammed at the bottom of the enclosure, there wasn’t enough space, resulting in upward pressure and warping of the board. An engineer on the team told us, “Things like this would be really hard to find, normally. Clicked ‘More Like This’ and found seven more.”

An old customer in mass production

During development, engineers at this customer had used Instrumental to discover a systemic issue where screws were not installed properly. While the factory rolled in process improvements, they were able to monitor the fixes from 6,000 miles away — to make sure the issue didn’t come back. Two weeks ago, several months into mass production, they saw the issue again. Normally, they would never know that action was needed, but they were able to identify the issue and get it fixed.

A customer preparing for their next build

It may be non-intuitive, but the heaviest usage of Instrumental software is actually between builds (as opposed to during builds). One of our customers recently completed their DVT build and used Detect to identify new issues post-build. As early users of Monitor, they also spent time preemptively setting up key regions and defects to monitor for their next build. As this customer team heads into the start of mass production, they know Instrumental will be on their line ensuring those defects are caught.