JTEC Test Stand Software
JTEC's testing equipment allows them to ensure that their instruments deliver the precision that is needed by their customers.
Tech Stack and Tools
About the Problem
Sometimes if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Other times, the longer it's working the more you start to worry about it breaking. This was the case with JTEC's instrument testing setup. Running MS-DOS in 2024 was not giving them confidence, and they wanted to replace the aging PC with a more modern solution.
About the Solution
This initial project had two phases. The first one was figuring out what hardware we could use to replace their current data acquisition (DAQ) system. After doing some research, we decided on a DAQ platform and started on the program conversion. The original program was a text-based UI written in QuickBASIC, the predecessor to Visual Basic. The new DAQ has a Python API available, so that was chosen as the replacement language since it would be fairly straightforward to port over the logic. After replacing the QuickBASIC code with the new Python version, we were able to run tests and compare the results from the original setup with the new one to ensure that we were getting what we expected given we had not only new software but also new hardware.
In addition to this project, JTEC had recently replaced another testing setup in their lab. The outputs that the new system produced no longer worked in their reports software. After investigating our choices, we opted to build a file format converter to translate the output of the new machine into something that the existing system would be able to read. Fortunately detailed specifications existed for both file formats, so we were able to put together another Python script to perform the translation. Again, we were in a situation where both the hardware and software changed, so we performed many tests and checked that the two systems were producing the same results.
