Author: Nick

Machines Monitoring

By Agilent In Circuit Test, HP In Circuit Test, HP3070, ICT, IFR In Circuit Test, IFR4220, Machines Monitoring, Machines Monitoring Systems

I have been working as an engineer in EMS (electronics manufacturing services) since 97 and always I had a special fascination for all kind of machines/robots used to DO our job from:

  • Screen Printers,
  • Chip Placers,
  • Fine Pitch Placers,
  • Reflow Ovens,
  • Was Soldering,
  • Conformal Coating,
  • In-Circuit Testers,
  • Functional Testers, etc.

Data, Data, Data…

All these machines are capable to follow a program/recipe and spit out log files containing tons of useful information.
Many times we rush through our daily duties and DO NOT pay enough attention to the data.
Many tried to prove that this behaviour is wrong, but at the end of the day – quantity prevails over quality big times and accountants rule the industry, and LLR countries are luring accountants.

I used to say – you as an engineer have to ‘explain’ any new idea in $ otherwise is absolutely dead – nobody will give a s**t on it and is absolutely dead. Yes, if you have a great revelation, engineering one – try put it plain and simple for money people: ROI (spend now, recover in x months…afterwards ++ profit), because nobody is excited by engineering facts – money talks.

Enough idle talk – I always liked to have a real-time ‘vision’ of what machines talk and interpret their chat and take advantage of this knowledge. SMT, Wave Soldering, ICT are in place since 30 years ago, but despite the huge transformation of the machine’s hardware, manufacturing is still mainly done using pen and paper – best case tons of EXCEL.
Excel you would say, it’s a good tool but requires lots of people getting data from archaic paper, filling out forms, copy paste formulas, do graphs and having the report done……MUCH TOO LATE.

Data is valuable if is FRESH and can make use of it….detect trends, identify root causes.

OEE – Overall Equipment Effectiveness

One of the simplest things that I would like to have and I have implemented, is to know the Overall Equipment Effectiveness – OEE – old concept – handy to know it.
It will give you a better understanding of your inefficiencies and uncover ways to overcome them.

OEE=A * P * Q

A – Availability – represents the time when machines are available for production percentage from total scheduled time.

P – Performance or at the other end Speed Loss – time lost with short stoppages – due to improper manning of the line, materials unavailability or machines re-loading (feeder change).

Q – Quality – it measures line yield – the percentage of good boards from total production.

What can you DO with this OEE?

Make the right decisions – if Availability is always an issue because machines are always breaking down you don’t need to buy more machines to make up for lost capacity – you just need to put together a better preventive maintenance plan and a better spare parts kits.

If you have problems with Performance, then machines are OK, but materials are not available JIT (Just In Time) or you don’t have enough people to cope with all changeovers and machines stops or it takes too long to change the feeders.

Quality – IT IS IMPORTANT – nobody will pay you for scrap products or let’s say non-working units and repair is hard work, require a lot of skills, is expensive and tedious. Put enough emphasis to minimise the faults – will reduce your costs.

What’s a good OEE?

I used to say 90% Availability, 90% Performance, 98% Quality will give you a nice and robust target OEE= 0.9*0.9*0.98=0.7938.
If you get it and are able to maintain it, then you are OK.

 

Machine’s Logs

All placement machines are capable to spit out log files with data about when a PCBA entered a machine when it went out and lots of info about errors on each board, each slot or each feeder. These data are an easy grab and knowing, real-time your output and calculating OEE will give you the power to change things…..otherwise….you just pray for the best and get the same s**t every day.

You don’t even know if people are not slowing down the line on purpose – if the Supervisor doesn’t want to tell you (of course he knows).

It is quite the same situation for TESTERS – In-Circuit Testers in special – right after you’ve tested a board you want to know your defects, top defects, machine utilisation, number of retests, access a debug database for more advise…..just looking at the failure ticket given by the machine you will not get all these.

Is quite a pity that big companies like HP, Genrad, IFR made awesome test machines, but so bloody dumb from data collection point of view. Log files generated are comprehensive, but all the work is left on Test ENG to figure out how to use them properly, wisely.

Just parsing all data from an HP3070 by example you could get – machine utilisation, real yield and shift throughput, number of the retest, top defects, SPC (Statistical Process Control) for any particular measurement you want.

Yes, I developed all these Machines Monitoring Solutions because I was sick and tired to be blind-folded and DO my job just based on subjective assumptions.

IF YOU WANT TO KNOW MORE ABOUT MACHINES MONITORING – drop us a line at:
customDB@nicks-software.com
or visit our site:
www.nicks-software.com – Products page has a comprehensive description of our HPDCA solution developed for ICT machines real-time monitoring.

All the best,
Nick – from Nick’s Software

Search Engine Optimisation

By Internet Statistics, SEO, SEO Tips
Note: This article is pretty old, but still valuable that’s why we updated it with latest best SEO tools available now (2019).
For those interested in SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) I will share here few things that I have found to be useful and few SEO software that I like to use in my work.
SEO…it’s quite a young discipline, but you can find on the Internet so many books and articles about it.
Many claim that they discovered the ‘Holy Grail’, when it’s quite hard to believe that in few clicks, as they tell you, you can achieve the top ranking how you are told…
SEO, as I know it is though work and perseverance.
Another thing is that using the right software tools you can reduce substantially your workload, but still need your brain to be involved and take the right decisions. I can’t see SEO, as a ONE click job how many sites pretend, advertise  and sell ($$$$).
Search Engine Optimisation, how I do it, is, methodical, structured work.
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization is the process of improving the visibility of your web site in search engines via organic search results from Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines.
A website that shows higher on a search engine results page normally gets more visitors, more potential customers and ultimately more sales…
Where do we start?
I. Search Engine Submission
Send your site to major search engines.
Why you don’t need to send your site to thousands search engines…
Because they are irrelevant.

Why? Over 95% of all searches come from Google, Yahoo or MSN. Many other minor search engines use the BIG THREE for their results.

II. Get your keywords for a good start
Firstly, yo need to brainstorm (involve more people) the best keywords and keyphrases for your site.
And remember the fewer things people know about SEO, the better keywords ideas come to their mind.

Then shortlist keywords  based on KEI (keyword efficiency index).

A good formula for KEI is:
KEI=((4-R)/3)*Sv*Sv/C
Where we have:

Relevance (R): it is how closely your keyword is related to what you offer to your customers.
We use a three points scale:

  • 1 for Excellent
  • 2 for Good
  • 3 for Poor
Search Volume (Sv): it is how many queries are made for a keyword per month.

Competition (C): that’s how many websites are already more or less optimized for this keyword.

III. Play search engine rules
Make your site to follow the ROBOT rules; create sitemap, robots file, fix broken links, correct HTML mistake.
IV. On Page optimization for 5 landing pages
Based on your most marketable keywords go and analyze how optimized your site is for this keywords.
Based on audit report (we use SemRush Site Audit)  go on and implement the recommendations. Now your site is fully optimized and better than your competitors.

This will have an  immediate, positive  effect on your rankings.

DO regular reports to show your Search Engine Ranking Performance (SERP) and Analytics to keep you informed with your website performance

V. Link Building

As you probably know, links are very important to your website’s ranking. Saying that you don’t want links from any website that promotes spam or adult content. Bad neighbourhood links are deadly for your online presence and need to be avoided at all costs.

That’s why a link building campaign, we always start it with a Status Report. The Report analyses exiting backlinks quantity and quality,  based on many factors including their domain rating and anchor phrases relevance and quality.

Based on Status Report we define the link building strategy and if necessary, we highlight links that might need to be disavowed.

A good link building campaign is based on good neighbourhood Sites:
• complementary sites in your industry
• every social media site on Earth
• blogging sites
• PDF submission sites
• business directories
• any “good neighbours” from those almost 2 billion websites available on the Internet

We use SEMrush and AHREFS to get your site ranking better. These tools are the best white hat SEO tools on the market that will help you get the highest possible ROI for your SEO campaigns.

Cheers, Nick

HTC Desire HD – No SIM Card in Phone

By Nick's Software

Took me few months to realize how bad, as a phone, the HTC Desire HD is…especially if you also have a dodgy carrier that has poor coverage, as I do (CRAZY JONES).

Initially I was very happy with my new toy, because I used it on Internet over WiFi and was fast and reliable and pleasant.

Phone wise, quite crap from the beginning, especially if you are left-handed, you could see a lot of signal attenuation when you want to keep the phone as a phone and talk….this is because the antenna is near the base towards left and when your hand covers it the signal could drops 20%-30% and it could represent the difference between having signal or having NOT….
So moving around the house and handling your phone with your lefty….bad idea and plenty of drop outs.
If you are right handed, it’s a bit better, attenuation is only about 10% – still can get NO SIGNAL, just because you cover the antenna….

As they used to say, NOKIA – they KNOW how to MAKE PHONES… tried same thing on my old N95 and attenuation is ZERO, of course…NOKIA knows how to make phones, too bad that they still need to learn things about smartphones. Sometimes you wish Nokia to merge with HTC and conquer the markets…

Enough about Nokia, back to HTC.
So, until a month ago I had a kinda usable phone, when, suddenly started to loose signal and seconds later a message ‘no sim card in phone’ was on the screen.
At the beginning, you restart, try to clean the SIM holder, go change your SIM…..nothing helped….only lost time and miscalls.
Sometimes switching to Airplane mode and back worked and I gained back the signal, sometimes restarting one, two times worked, but the thing is that now is working fine and minutes later you are NO SIGNAL, without any warning and the signal is not coming back….phone doesn’t try to re-connect…

OF COURSE if you have a super DODGY provider as I have: Crazy Jones – your phone will loose the signal 50 times a day and on top of that if your phone has this issue of not getting the signal back….then you will be without signal for almost all your working day.

The thing is:
If you put ‘another telco’ SIM in your phone….like Telstra, you barely remember that your phone has a BUG in it, because if you DO NOT loose the signal then you have it…all day long

Anyway, I discussed with my crazy jones guys and they suggested the only thing that I haven’t done yet – factory reset. Done it today – same sh…t.

Called again and they said to send the phone for repair, it will take a while, but they will fix it……then I read more on Internet about same issue and found that more than 50% of people that had issue, still have the issue after they’ve got their phones ‘repaired’…..why? because ‘repair’ means only reflash and not always this is the solution, even if firmware is corrupt or has an issue, many times they re-installed the same version….you know all kind of human negligence….

Next step I WILL TRY to RE-INSTALL the firmware by myself….hopefully I won’t brick the phone…still have to pay for it.

Keep you posted about my recent frustration evolution.

If you have suggestions, root cause analysis…..anything about issue…reply or drop me an email.

Regards,
a frustrated webmaster without his favorite phone

21st April 2011 – a new day a new feeling

Not really….the phone is still crap and I have decided to GO ON and DO all the steps to make it working by myself or brick it….
Had enough help desk flavored non-sense and  stupid advices and crap…
Crazy Jones….you suck…no signal coverage and useless help desk…..anyway better than Vodafone nuisance and endless wait….

First step first YOU need to ROOT your PHONE.
 As you know….NO WARRANTY of success, it worked for me doesn’t mean that will work for you 🙂

  1. Download Paul’s VISIONary+ tool and transfer it to your phone.
  2. Install the tool by tapping on the APK file.
  3. Launch the tool and enable the ‘Set system r/w after root’ checkbox.
  4. Tap ‘Temproot Now!’ and wait for the process to finish.
  5. Tap ‘Attempt Permroot Now!’ and again wait for the process to finish. The phone will automatically reboot once done.
  6. To test if rooting has been successful, install Terminal Emulator from Android Market, launch it and enter the command ‘su’ in it (without the quotes). If you get the # prompt, permanent rooting has been successful.

Got details from here:
https://www.addictivetips.com/mobile/how-to-permanently-root-htc-desire-hd-complete-guide/

Then you need:

  • ClockworkMod Recovery 2.5.1.3 or 3.0.2.5 (recommended)

These guys really rock and have done a beautiful ROM that works and give you back your PHONE by adding speed, stability and signal boost to a stock ROM.
My deeply regards to you MIKE1986..

All the details about this custom ROM from Team Revolution can be found here:
https://teamrevolution.co.cc/rom/no-sense-version.html

Are also few other nice custom ROMs available – they work and have pretty good pre-installed bundles.

Just choose your phone model and find the ROMs:
https://alchemistar.blogspot.com/p/custom-rom.html

I tried few, nice one to mention
https://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=842802

Anyway, after I tried few ROMs and tested my phone for a while….my issue reoccurred…. lost signal and phone can’t get it back…and sometimes just leaving the phone on the table…..I’ve got no SIM in phone….it really sucks…..and finally I have to admit that could be a HARDWARE failure and can’t fix it through software upgrades ‘tricks’.

SO, I decided to give in (restore factory settings and radio first) and send my HTC Desire HD for repair…and hope that the guys won’t do only a ROM and RADIO upgrade and send it back….anyway I’ve got a firm response from CJ nice lady…that if my phone won’t be ‘resolved’ after MAX 3 trips to repair shop….then they will give me a replacement…time will tell.

Sent phone to repair on 26th April and will take them 10 days to ‘fix’ it…CJ will call me when ready.

I’m thrilled….
27th April 11 – same disappointed HTC Desire HD user

Cheers,
Nick

Hyper Search

By Hyper Search, Nick's Software

You will find it better than many other desktop searching utilities.
It indexes all your files, not only a few predefined types. Looks for your e-mails and chats.

It will see and add to the database anything that is connected or mapped.
You can index the entire network, millions of files…

Under beta tests now – very promising  – more accurate and faster than Google Desktop.

Visit Nick’s Software for more details.