Services

Engineering, end to end.

A long-term engineering relationship, and the test equipment and products that come out of it.

Approach

No two clients start in the same place. An engineering department needs extra capacity on a problem it has already defined. For a manufacturer, it is a tester for a product already on the line, or a revision to one that has outgrown its design. A startup arrives with an idea and little else. And not all of it is product work: inside a plant, the problem is often the process itself, solved with a purpose-built system that runs on the line. The engineering is the same in every case; only the starting point changes.

The work is done inside the client's business, alongside the people who know the process best. Some engagements end with a single delivered project. Many become long-standing relationships.

Test equipment

Every unit tested before it ships

Every electronic product is built around at least one PCBA, a printed circuit board assembly: the board with its components fitted, usually made by a specialist assembly house. Between that assembly house and the customer, test equipment checks the product twice, once as a board and once as a finished product. A tester that is wrong either lets faults through or rejects good product, so it has to be more trustworthy than the thing it tests.

Every tester begins with a functional specification, the contract that defines what is tested and what counts as a pass. Sometimes the product's designer already holds it, and the tester is built to it. Sometimes it has yet to be written, and the testing is defined together with the designer, measurement by measurement.

With the specification agreed, design moves through defined milestones toward a tester made for the production floor: robust, built for volume, and equipped for exactly what the product demands. Each one ships fully documented, down to its operating and calibration manuals.

  1. Assembly house
  2. PCBA verifier
  3. Product assembly
  4. Final product tester
  5. Customer

PCBA verifiers

Verify the board before it goes into anything: the right components, correctly fitted, behaving as designed. The designer's test points set what can be verified. A fault found here costs minutes; inside a finished product, it costs a strip-down.

Final product testers

Test the finished product the way it will be used. Assembly brings faults of its own: a pinched cable, a missed connector, a damaged part. This is the final proof that the product does what its specification promises, before it leaves the factory.

Product development

From idea to manufacturable product

Every product starts with a specification. It defines what the product must do, the environment it must survive, the cost it must meet and the volume it will be built in. Each design decision is checked against it.

Electronics, PCB layout, firmware and software are developed together as a single design. Each revision is prototyped, tested and refined until the design is ready for production. Testability is part of the design from the first schematic, and the production tester can be developed in parallel.

All intellectual property belongs to the client. Schematics, layouts, source code and documentation are delivered in full, with support through the first production builds.

New products

From concept to first production run: specification, design, prototypes and verification. Designed from the outset to be manufactured, tested and maintained in volume.

Existing products

Revisions to products already in production: obsolete components, cost reduction, new features, known faults. The existing design is analysed before any change is made.

Contact

Start with the problem

info@nikolalogic.co.za