By Loofie Gutterman
Geotest - Marvin Test Systems
In September, Mil-Aero ATE aficionados made their annual pilgrimage to AutoTestCon (ATC), which took place this year in Baltimore, Maryland. In the past, ATC was a showcase for PXI and this year was no different . . . or maybe it was. With PXI celebrating its 10th anniversary, the PXI Systems Alliance (PXISA) chose ATC to kick off its anniversary year activities. This included an official toast and exciting product demonstrations in the PXISA booth.
In previous years, you could always find exciting PXI applications and demonstrations in ATC exhibitor booths. Unfortunately, that could not be said about the PXISA booth. Since most of the efforts of PXISA members were on targeting applications and demos for their own booths, the PXISA booth usually had only static displays of one or two chassis with some nonoperational PXI modules. For this anniversary year the Alliance decided this was unacceptable, so Alliance members developed three multi-vendor applications that showcased the open architecture, robustness, and interoperability of PXI.
The first demo was an 864-channel Jet Engine data acquisition and monitoring system developed by GaGe, KineticSystems, Geotest, Keithley, ADLINK, and National Instruments. This 3U/6U combination system monitored temperature, pressure, flow, RPM, and ARINC-429 channels of a simulated jet engine.
The second demo was a compact mixed-signal test application developed by GaGe, Geotest, Keithley, Mac Panel, Pickering, and Ztec. This system demonstrated the compact footprint of PXI and its ability to perform a variety of measurements, including nonlinearity, channel skew, rise times, harmonic distortion, signal-to- noise, and spurious free dynamic range.
The third demo was a ZigBee Wireless transceiver tester developed by National Instruments, Keithley, Goepel Electronic, Pickering Interfaces, and MAC Panel. This system demonstrated PXIs capabilities to perform RF tests, including RF signal strength, error vector magnitude, and power spectral density, as well as JTAG structural tests on ZigBee transceiver components.
With three exciting fully operational demo systems as these, it was no surprise that the booth received such a large amount visitors. To further increase the booths attendance, the Alliance celebrated PXIs anniversary by having champagne and cake at the booth. All you had to do to receive some was listen to a short speech from yours truly. I initially thought it was my natural charm that brought all these people to the booth, but once I saw that we went through 50 bottles of champagne in less than an hour, I reconsidered.
The success of PXI over the past 10 years is evident not only in the number but also the diversity of applications using the platform. From testing the controllers of the Microsoft Xbox 360, to testing the electronics on the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, to operation in nuclear power plants, PXI has a proven track record of delivering highly reliable and flexible automated test systems –demonstrating time and again the interoperability of the standard.
With PXI already used in a wide range of industries and applications, the adoption of the platform for new applications may expand even further with the integration of PXI Express as part of the PXI standard. Announced in 2005, this new addition to the PXI specification offers the highest bandwidth, lowest latency, and best timing and synchronization of any test platform, while maintaining full backward compatibility with PXI.
Last but not least – we cannot talk (or write) about ATC this year without mentioning that the show was Navy focused, thanks to NAVAIR PMA-260. Not only was the show chaired this year by Bill Ross, NAVAIR also chose ATC as the site for the long-awaited eCASS industry day.
