The Testing Blog

National Technical Systems Inc. (NASDAQ: NTSC) (NTS), is pleased to announce the addition of tunable resonant beam apparatus for metal-to-metal simulated Pyroshock testing at its Tinton Falls, NJ engineering and test facility.

Pyroshock testing is designed to simulate the high-frequency, high-magnitude shock pulse that a product may experience as the result of an explosive event, such as an explosive impact on a military tank structure or the separation of booster rockets from the space shuttle during flight. This type of explosive impact can cause failures in electronic components and thus endanger the survival of the system as a whole.

The Pyroshock test differs from other mechanical shock tests in that there is very little rigid body motion of the product. In this test method, an aluminum bar with rectangular cross-section is clamped to a massive base. Clamps are intended to impose nearly fixed-end conditions on the beam. When the beam is struck with a cylindrical mass fired from the air gun beneath the beam, the beam will resonate at the first bending frequency of the beam, which is a function of the distance between the clamps. The tunable resonant beam method provides a good, general purpose Pyroshock simulator, since the knee frequency is continuously adjustable over a wide frequency range, 500 Hz to 3,000 Hz for example.

NTS’ new 17,000 pound system is designed to simulate the far-field Pyroshock spectrum. The original system design was developed by Neil Davie, Principal Member of the Technical Staff, Mechanical Environments, Sandia National Laboratories. The design was then adopted as a “recommended practice” by the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology and published in the “Pyroshock Testing Techniques” IEST-RP-DTE032.1 document.

“The addition of this new test capability demonstrates both the technical expertise of the NTS engineering team in its construction, and our commitment to continue to add capabilities and capacity to meet the ongoing needs of our customers in the defense and aerospace markets” commented NTS General Manager Richard Gaynor, “We look forward to demonstrating this unique new capability.”

For more information – click here.

NTS  is pleased to announce the approval of our Calgary, Alberta, Canada laboratory as a Verizon Independent Testing Laboratory (ITL). This certification program approval allows NTS Calgary to perform NEBS testing for Verizon’s telecommunications equipment vendors.

Telecommunications equipment suppliers to Verizon must have their products tested to ensure compliance with the NEBS (Network Equipment Building System) specifications. NEBS is the generic requirement for the spatial environmental, EMI/EMC, and product safety of telecom equipment being deployed in the central office. These requirements are mandated by Telecommunications Operating Companies, providing them confidence that all telecom equipment has a high degree of reliability and will work under extreme environments while maintaining service for their customers.

Manufacturers of Information Technology Equipment (ITE) intended for sale in the European Union should take note of some important changes that are slated to go into effect with regard to their EMC testing requirements under emissions standard EN 55022:2006.

In November 2008 the European Union’s Official Journal (OJ) published lists of standards for the Electromagnetic Compatibility (EMC) Directive and Radio and Telecommunications Terminal Equipment Directive (R&TTED). Both lists include references to EN 55022:2006 and its amendment A1, released in 2007.

EN 55022:2006 will supersede EN 55022;1998 and become the requirement for Information Technology Equipment (ITE) sold into the European Union after October 1st 20091 , with the requirements of Amendment A1:2007 coming into force one year later on October 1st 2010. What are the differences between the 1998 and 2006 versions of the standard and what new requirements will be introduced by A1:2007? Let’s begin by reviewing the history of CISPR 22 from 1997 onwards. International Standard CISPR 22 is the basis for not only EN 55022 but also for many of the other national versions of standards for ITE.

To read the rest of the article, please click here.

Elliott Laboratories is currently equipped to conduct the EU free space testing above 1 GHz per EN55022:2006+ A1 and/or CISPR 22:2005 + A1 in all chambers at our Fremont facility. For more information about how this change affects your products or for a price quote to test your product, please contact us at info@elliottlabs.com or call at 408-245-7800.

I’ve you’re a hardware or software developer, you obviously know that Microsoft Windows 7 is on the way – and it’s coming quickly! According to the latest rumors (backed up by the stability of the test builds being made available), Windows 7 should be released by the end of the year, but the question is are you (and your products) ready? Have you tested your hardware and/or software products under Windows 7?

With the dismal release that was Windows Vista, many users and corporations have held off on upgrading their Windows XP or earlier platforms to the latest version of Windows. There is a huge amount of pent-up demand for a fast, stable, secure operating system, and as soon as Windows 7 hits, a large number of computers will be upgrading. Don’t get caught unprepared, as many manufacturers did with Windows Vista.

Windows 7 is much more than just fancy window dressings. Windows 7 has made significant performance improvements on the underlying technology which is based on Windows Vista, including much of the same driver technologies. If you’ve submitted products for Windows certification, you’ve probably already discovered that Microsoft is requiring that new submissions include testing under Windows 7. So, if you haven’t already, make sure to get testing NOW!

Ever have a computer just totally die on you in the middle of testing? Of course, if you’re testing a new product, it’s not that uncommon to have it crash, and sometimes even corrupt the system. The problem is if you’ve still got data on that computer that you need to get to – or even the debug logs to see what happened before every went to heck. Problem is, what do you use to get into your dead computer?

As long as you can still boot from a CD, you’ve got options. Check out this article from PCWorld: Six Downloadable Boot Discs That Could Save Your PC

And don’t forget to back up your system! Even if you can reproduce the data, you probably don’t want to spend the time (and your boss doesn’t want to spend the money on your salary) to get it back.

During many discussions that President Ronald Regan had with the Soviet Union regarding nuclear disarmament, he outlined his position very clearly with the phrase “Doveryai, No Proveryai – Trust, But Verify.” This important concept is the very basis of certification programs. Certification programs aren’t about lack of trust on the part of the standard group/alliance; rather, it’s an acknowledgment that even well-respected companies, that have developed many products based on the same specification over many years, may still have times in which their products don’t meet the standard.

As with any technology developed by a group and products developed by individual manufacturers interpreting that specification, it is highly probable that, left to themselves, individual products may not interoperate nor necessarily meet the spirit of the specification due to nuances in interpretation of the specification. If you don’t make sure, via certification, that your product is interoperable, you negate one of the very reasons that standards and alliance groups are formed in the first place – interoperability. One of consumers’ biggest gripes (about everything from wireless technologies to kid’s building blocks) is a lack of interoperability.

Although interoperability is certainly the most important reason for certifications, it isn’t the only reason. Certification programs are also valuable marketing tools to help manufacturers sell more products by proving interoperability to customers. Customers want to know that they can just pick up a box off a store shelf with a specific logo on it and know that it’ll work with other products they own using the same logo. Plus it provides name recognition for the standard/alliance. Products that “just work” lead consumers to come back and purchase other products that “just work” from the same standard over and over again. Even soccer moms know what common standards like USB are.

With the growing market place of competing products, technologies, and standards, now more ever, it is important to make sure that you get your products certified before they’re released.

Just a quick note, if you’re using MSXML (Microsoft XML Core Services), make sure you test and retest your installation routines. If your customers have upgraded to Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 3, you may run into issues. As of SP3, Microsoft has placed MSXML under system protection so that applications/installations that try to update/remove MSXML fail. The most common occurrence of this has been with Microsoft SQL Server, and Microsoft has posted a work-around on their website. However, last thing you want to be doing is fielding support calls, emails, and tickets because of this issue. We just caught this testing another company’s product and thought we’d pass it along. Hopefully, Microsoft will help developers in handling this issue.

When you’re trying to test your website with many different web browsers, you often run into problems. In particular, Windows really isn’t designed to have multiple versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer (MSIE) installed at the same time. You could setup multiple platforms and maybe use a KVM to save space, but most of us don’t have the room for all that equipment just sitting around all the time.

As we mentioned in a previous post, a good solution to the issue is to setup multiple “virtual machines” (VMs) on your computer. Each VM has it’s own operating system and storage so you can install a version of Internet Explorer in each virtual machine. We also have previously discussed how you use VMs to learn how to use Linux and try out the various distributions (distros). Many of the distros already have pre-rolled VMs available (via VMware’s site or various image sites like this one for Virtual Box), but sometimes there’s that one distro you want to try without a VM. What do you do? Easy – roll your own.

Rather than going into the details of setting up your own VM, however, Lifehacker has a great article on how to setup, configure and install operating systems into a virtual machine using Virtual Box. Give it a read – it’s a very well done article!

If you’re performing testing on a Mac and looking for a simple application to ghost/image the hard drive, take a look at Carbon Copy Cloner. I know it seems like you should be able to just copy all the files to an external hard drive and just select it from the Startup Disk preference pane, but it doesn’t work in MacOS X. And, if you’re doing a lot of configuration testing, installation/uninstallation, etc., it would be really handy to have an identical copy of the hard drive, right? Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC) to the rescue.

Just install CCC (or SuperDuper!) and you can clone a low-level copy of your internal hard drive to another partition or drive. It’s very handy, and if you really want a good backup, you can have it scheduled to update the cloned image so you’ll always have the latest version of all your hard drive files. When my hard drive suffered an unfortunate failure a few years ago, I had no worries – I had an identical copy of my hard drive all setup which allowed me to recover all my work on another Mac. It’s fast, accurate, and donation-ware so you can try it out before you buy.

Previously, we discussed using VNC to remotely control a test platform. Today, a quick introduction to Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP). Like VNC, RDP provides remote access to a platform, using an RDP server and RDP client, to control the keyboard and mouse of the platform as if you were sitting right in front of it. However, there are many differences between the two products:

• While VNC is GPL’d software, RDP is Microsoft’s proprietary protocol. So, while both the VNC server and client have been ported to multiple platforms (Windows, Mac OS, Linux, etc.), the RDP Server is typically a Windows-based product.
• Windows XP & Windows Vista ship with Remote Desktop Connection and Remote Assistance, both of which use the RDP protocol client & server protocols. While Mac OS X and Linux (Ubuntu, etc.) typically ship with VNC-based products.
• Due to Microsoft’s low-level hooks in their software, RDP connections usually perform much better than VNC products.
• Microsoft’s products use RSA Security’s RC4 cipher for encryption.

Which one is best? That’s up to you. Both offer many functions. If you’re using Windows platforms and you want the greatest performance, grab a copy of an RDP-based application like Remote Desktop Connection. If you’re cross-platforms, VNC may be a better tool for you. Either way, get your remote connections setup so you can get out of work on time!