- Posted on: 2021-06-08
We’re frequently asked how we consistently reduce our clients’ troubleshooting by 75%, and what makes us so different from the LabVIEW consultants they’re familiar with. The answer is that our philosophy and approach are unique, allowing us to solve challenges that are rarely addressed in traditional projects. With a focus on accelerating all engineering activities, and viewing most ATS as being very similar, we approach everything from first principles.
So how do we tackle the traditional challenges of interacting with multiple pieces of equipment?
1. A platform vs a framework
Most software developers appreciate the benefit of working with a set of standard principles when developing an application. Relying on a framework achieves this but it leaves you with all the work to create the most difficult aspects, the functions. Symplify™ comes with all of this pre-built and tested, greatly reducing your workload and allowing you to simply customize, rather than develop. Data logging, test executive, graphing, visualization, PID and more all ship with Symplify™, ready for you to take advantage of. This results in more features, with higher reliability in a shorter timeframe for our clients.
2. Beyond meeting requirements: Answering future questions
We know you have a list of questions you set out to answer with your ATS, but what if you already had the tools to answer your next set of questions, without any extra development?
When a test fails, the computer should be able to deliver all the information to the engineers to quickly identify the root cause without having to re-run a test. With Symplify you have access to months of detailed messages and measurements from thousands of tests, to quickly compare results and find the cause of a failure. With access to all of this information at your fingertips, the answer to your next question is only a click away (TDMS viewer)
3. Customize rather than program
Symplify™ includes a large number of drivers and functionalities that can be customized at run-time. Some of the more notable ones include: CAN drivers, SCPI drivers, PID controllers, Tags monitoring, Graph and even the test plan. Tuning can therefore be adjusted without having to make a new executable build or a LabVIEW development environment.
4. We empower our clients to own and maintain the code
Our goal is to hand our tools over to your team, rather than require you to come back to us for every change and update. With so much code readily available within the Symplify™ platform, we see our role mostly as systems architect and invite our clients to create the test plan (scripts) and customize some drivers (usually talking to their product and the “models” required by the ATS.)
5. Drivers vs drivers
We wrote about this some time ago (LINK) but our approach to creating a driver is different than the common “driver” definition. Whereas manufacturers often call APIs “drivers”, Synovus calls driver self-contained code that run in its own thread, at a give rate and communicates with the rest of the application through our Tags abstractions. This code often calls the manufacturers API but this approach guarantees determinism of every part of the system and entirely decouples the driver’s code from the rest of the application!
Want to know more about how we can address the challenges that you face with your current ATS, contact our engineers today and evaluate Symplify risk free today.