Production Testing the Red Reactor

From previous experiences at various companies I can’t emphasise enough the importance of thinking about production test early on in the design phase. If you don’t plan for this you will find that it is difficult to access the critical signals for test, and it takes much longer to test which all adds to the time and cost of production, but might also limit how well you can test before shipping.

On the Red Reactor we have physical test points so we can precisely view signal behaviour, as part of a test jig that will use a Raspberry Pi4 to run through a long sequence of tests to verify each and every board we make. The picture shows you our test software interface, which takes us methodically through stress tests and checks all the board’s functions and interfaces.

This way we can fully check the charging cycle, high power delivery during CPU/GPU stress testing and all the battery monitoring functions.

So you’ll know that only when we pass all the tests is the board ready to ship!