Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Hearing Things What's new at Axyston

Nice human interest story, but not many technical details.
More importantly, thumbs down on that name, "Axyston." Way, way, way down. Sorry Mojo.

Back when I was pimping programming services to the oil and gas industry of Alberta, one of the fundamental issues of local manufacturers was managing their bill of materials. Companies usually had a patchwork of databases, accounting software, and CAD software that didn't talk to each other. It was usually a $$$ salaried comptroller's full time job to manually sift through the mess to keep production running and supplies in inventory. That's a problem that can be fixed with a 6 or 7 figure bespoke software job. So I can see why Bryston would want to port their entire inventory management system over to whatever Axiom was running.

The burn-in testing was a feature that was great for reducing RMA's, but we always lost whatever RFQ bids were out there because there wasn't enough margin to ensure profitability, and we knew that our competitors were selling low quality components in their bids. Warranty service calls are not billable hours, so we eventually just quit that side of the business.

There was nothing to port. It was a manual process to move BOMs from Bryston to Axiom's MRP.

You either invest on the front end through testing or the back end through repairs. Either way, you pay.

A lot of what I theorized about BrAxiom was confirmed in the article.

Someone posted that article a while back. I thought it was you Mojo ….

This is the first I've seen it.

IMHO, Cheaper to burn-in and test up front … having your customers do It for you is expensive unless you don’t plan on doing repairs or keeping customers. And there are other benefits ….

Back when I was designing hardware sometimes the part tolerances were too tight (read that as too expensive) to get every unit built to meet spec. By opening up the tolerances, it was well worth letting some percentage to fall out (in testing) to be reworked. The rework was cheap for the few units which fell out for this reason. The testing was being done anyway.

Yup. And HALT and HASS every design.

That's true. It was definitely interesting at that level.

Back in the 90’s I was buying cheap PCs which had really poor warrantees. So I stress them a bit by covering them with a blanket and ran memory tests for a day or two. I had a 30 day window … as I didn’t want to deal with the manufacture… I wanted to return them to the store. Figured if they survived they’d last a while.

Very resourceful. I've also used a hot shower but shielded from the water spray.

Sounds expensive unless you like to take day long showers ... plus I'm kind of doubtful that the humidity would serve any purpose for burn-in and might even be harmful ,.. but then again it's not really my area of expertise ...

It's my area. Manly-man hardware.

ahhh, fill me in on burn-in and humidity ... I just thought it was a spec you needed to test for

The physics behind humidity testing is analogous to temperature testing. Temperature testing reveals infant mortalities related to stresses that arise from the coefficient of thermal expansion of different materials. Humidity testing reveals infant mortalities related to stresses that arise from the coefficient of moisture expansion of different materials. Humidity testing can also reveal other nasties like contamination of solder joints, pins and interconnects and the PCB itself.

Humidity testing would be a good stressor for revealing the robustness of adhesives used in drivers.

So what's a good % humidity to shoot for ....

60% RH for healthy 'nads.

Ok next time I’ll think about throwing in a humidifier …
That is if it’s 60% steady state. I could cycle it (and temp too) but I’d have setup stuff.