In Circuit Test - HP3070 - IFR4220 - Machine Monitoring

If you are in EMS business, you know how important is to have a good test solution for all your products.
A common test solution is In Circuit Test and also you can have:

•  Visual Inspection, 
• AOI (Automatic Optical Inspection), 
• X-RAY, 
• Functional Test 
• and many more.

ICT is many times a basic requirement for PCBA's testing.
Test solution has to be properly designed and deployed in order to give you a good test coverage.

Once you have it designed, deployed, validated, you need to get under control the messages from the ICT machines.

ICT prints dockets for each failed PCBA and also creates logfiles, where tests results and measurement are recorded/logged.

It's all good to have the data saved in the log files, but when you need to analyze large amount of information from the log files you need a tool that will help you extract and organize these data.

Scripts, OEM software tools have been made available, but quite often these tools were expensive and not really designed for engineering and/or manufacturing.
When software designers are not understanding the shop floor needs, could result in poorly developed solutions that are not helping too much.....that's reality.

HPDC (HP Data Collector) Inception  

I had the same issue as many others, had data available in the log files, but it was so damn hard to get them out of there and make them useful, meaningful in a good report.

By example, many time I've questioned myself:

• Which are the top 10 ICT failures for a specific product (real time, would be nice)?
• What's the average test time for a product?
• What's the average measurement for a specific test?
• What's ICT loading/utilization?
•  What's the ICT yield (the real one)?
• How many times the boards are tested (number of retests)?
• Are going out to the customers only boards that passed ICT?
• The right ICT program has been used to test the PCBAs?
• What should I do with a fail board if the fail docket is missing? Do I have to test it again when failure data are available somewhere (log file)?

I couldn't find too much help checking available solutions from ICT manufacturers like HP (Agilent), IFR (Marconi), Genrad and then I've started thinking how can it be done?

 HPDC - What it does?

HPDC is a file parser - it opens log files, from ICT Machines like HP3070, IFR4220, takes relevant information from them and sends the information to a MySQL database.



Now that data are nicely organized, in a MySQL database purposely built for easy access, creating reports should be an easy task now.

HPDA (HP Data Analyzer) - What it does?

HPDA is a software solution developed to interpret data collected by HPDC, bring them closer to you, make them useful.
Through comprehensive reports this software is capable to present a holistic image of your ICT testers.

Need to know yields, top defects, retest, cycle time - you'll have it quick:
 

Need to know ICT machines utilization - done in a sec

 

Need to see more specific failure report or failures related with a specific serial number or do paperless debug - no worries:

 Need to know if a board was pass or fail last time when it was tested, or if that board was tested using the right program - too easy:


 The whole bunch of log files data at your finger tips, that's useful.

If you want to find more about HPDC & HPDA or ICT data collection/collectors in general check the presentation linked below:
http://nicks-software.com/exp/hpdca/HPDCA-ICT-Data-Collector-and-Analyser.html

Or contact me.

 Have fun playing with your ICT machines....

Cheers,
Nick

Android 2.3.5 for HTC Desire HD

In theory an update should be a good thing and Gingerbread V2.3.5 had listed few good things in its original release in July'11, like:

• Improved network performance for the Nexus S 4G, among other fixes and improvements
• Fixed Bluetooth bug on Samsung Galaxy S
• Improved Gmail application
• Shadow animations for list scrolling
• Camera software enhancements
• Improved battery efficiency

Few weeks ago, I've updated  my HTC Desire HD, OTA, to Gingerbread 2.3.5 and since then I have different issues than before (2.3.3)....

The most annoying one is the battery life, was bad before, now totally sucks. Even if the phone just sits there in the pocket or on the table and have only few calls and a quick Internet browse, before I get home is already on red (used to be still on green with similar type of use).

I also noticed that now I'm connected more to GSM instead of 3G, in areas where before I used to have 3G, in this situation Internet experience is almost impossible.

Another one, reboot takes forever and even if you think that it is not that important, could be sometimes. I experienced apps crashing and rebooting every now and then, and had to wait long minutes to get it back.

I think I had enough of these poor quality STOCK ROMS and STOCK RADIO and I will go back to customized (had before and I was happy with it - stupid enough though to come back to STOCK) ones and I will search to find THE ONE that at least gives me a decent battery life and increased signals.

I'll come back with my findings.

Search Engine Optimisation Tips - Part 4

Off-Site Optimization - Link Building

Are many articles on the Internet about links building and what to avoid and what to do...

I just want to point out that Google treats links as appreciation of your site from others and it gives value to each inbound link that you get.
More value, the better, so a good source to get valuable  links would be websites with high PageRank and less outbound links,because value of a link is direct proportional with page PR and inverse proportional with number of external links that that page has.

On the other hand, quantity matters, even if you get links from Sites with low PR and lots of external links, you still get some value for your links and, most important, these Sites could evolve in the future and get higher PR.

How to get links?

If your Site is new, a good source for links could be link-exchange. Software Packages like SEO Powersuite offers  powerful tools to get started and manage your link-exchange campaign.
Link Assistant let you find link partners, sends customized emails, tracks  status and scans their websites to find your links. Link Assistant is a very useful tool to control your link building campaign.

Of course, you should ask all your friends and family to posts ONE WAY links on their sites. ONE WAY links are powerful. If you can get SITE LINKS - links posted on each page of a website - they are more powerful, if not at least bargain for a link on a main landing page - like HOME PAGE.

A pretty easy way of getting valuable links is commenting on BLOGS - especially blogs that are posting DO FOLLOW links. Search in Google for "Do Follow Blogs" and you will get a list of them.
Important thing when commenting on Blogs is to read the article first and get a response that is relevant and not SPAMMY.
If you SPAM your comment will be probably deleted by BLOG Admin/Moderator.
Try to be reasonable first time....

Many people are saying that WEB Directories are DEAD... I wouldn't say so, it still important to get your Site enlisted to the major ones and then if you have time and patient send your sites to more directories. A manual submission is preferred, or at least a smart semi-automatic.

I would recommend you to submit your Site to DMOZ and any directory that you find and has a page rank higher than 6. Many directory lists could be found just searching Google.

Witting articles is a good source of links and a good way of growing content. Articles could be sent to Article Directories, published on your on Site Blog, posted on external blogs, other blogs.
Just remember, from our experiments - Blogspot and WordPress pages are indexed each 5-15min. It's a good spot to publish something cool/explosive/viral....you name it.

Don't forget about social media - a strong presence in social media will give you links and visitors.
Social media sites are extremely valuable because they are free to join and have high PR. It takes few minutes to join a social media site and set up a page that contains a link to your website. Are sooo many, start with Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, Digg.
Search "list of social media sites" in Google and find a huge number of Social Media Sites not mentioned here.

These are only 'the classical' way of getting links.
More details are coming soon.

What should you use as links title?

Of course links are valuable, but are more valuable if are using as title your most marketable keywords. Use your keywords as title for these links, vary them to get similar amounts of links for each and don't forget about image links. Use ALT attribute to key in your keywords.

Another important step in link-building is to scan your competition and analyze what links they have, which are more valuable and how did they  advance in SERP (Search Engine Results Page).
You could do it using Yahoo linkdomain search operator or you can expand this analysis using professional software - SEO SpyGlass  - it offers a range of professional reports that surgically analyze your competitors pages and their most powerful links. Get links from same source and you could get in front of them, in SERP.

That's about it, for today.

Cheers,
Nick
 

Search Engine Optimisation Tips - Part 3

On-Site Optimization
  
Content matters, but few things have an immediate, positive effect upon your Site, so add them in your TO DO LIST of ON-SITE Optimization.

Write your Meta(s) - Meta Title and Meta Description are the most important ones - for people and for Google bot.

Meta Title is the blue underlined text displayed in the search results page for each site. 

Meta Description is the black text that usually follows, underneath the title.

Both represent the essence of your business, you have less than 100 characters to summarize your activity in your title and a bit more than that in your meta description.
 
They both need to contain your most valuable keywords, written in a human-friendly and Google-friendly way.

Once you have done this, could be enough to get your site listed in Top 100. Of course is not enough to be in Top 100 and everybody wants to be in Top 10.

If you want to play tough, on-site optimization could be applied further and you should optimize your:

• meta keywords - add more keywords
• body text - stuffed with your most marketable keywords, do not over-do it
• H1 Headings - good place for a strong keyword
• bold text - another nice place for few more strong keywords
• anchor text -add your most valuable keys
• image alt texts - first thing, all images should have ALT text; secondly, they should be stuffed with keywords - smartly put - human readable and BOT friendly
• Don't Forget - Site Load Time Matters - if you have a huge, highly optimized Site, which is very slow - it will not DO well - speed matters a lot and keep an eye on it.

 If you need software help to DO all these ON-SITE OPTIMIZATION stuff, WEBSITE Auditor is a nice software, that lets you analyze and export pretty useful reports.


You can try it for free from here.
 

For more  info about ON-SITE OPTIMIZATION - drop us an email at: info@nicks-software.com

Cheers,
Nick