At a place called Veris I play a test engineer. Here are some of the things I have whomped up.
This is called the Air Box. It is for routing two different sources of high pressure air to a unit under test. Proportional valves take high pressure air from an air amplifier and supplies this box, which then routes the air to the ports of the unit under test, which is an electronic differential pressure gage.
This one is affectionately known as the Borg Cube. It holds 128 products in 16 of the Mux Cards shown. The Cube fits in an environmental chamber used for calibrating the products over temperature.
The innards of a programming/test box for the same product as the Borg Cube.
My pride and joy. This is a low-pressure differential generator capable of generating +/- 10" H2O pressure. This replaces an older method involving u-tubes and mercury. I have hated the old method since 2001 when I first saw it. I finally got a chance to replace it, and this is the result. Obviously it is semi-complete in this picture. The rollers comprise a 'Peristaltic Pump' and get some very small tubes clamped over them. As the rollers turn they pinch the tubes, thereby moving small amounts of air. The board in the background is a hand-built proto with an Atmel Mega32 on it running a 'PID' controller. The yellow things are solenoid valves for routing air around.
Here is a shot of the completed fixture in action. The 'Pressure Generator 3000' is the pump box shown above. The box above it with the red lights if the programming box. The completed fixture has been running since 2/2006 and knocks out about 100 products per day.
My latest creation. It is a 12-port 0-30 psi pressure gage for monitoring products during thermal cycling testing. The products will be in a chamber that can go from -40C to +80C in minutes. It does this by shuttling the products bewtween two chambers, one hot and one cold.