Production testing equipment

[davman]

Hi,

Anyone familiar/experiened in production-test gear for BLE?

• Test sets, i.e. LitePoint, Anritsu, USRP, NI?

• What's relevant to test, i.e. output power, sensitivity, carrier & drift, etc.

• Test-coverage, i.e. what can the expensive gear above catch vs. a setup just using a simple nrf-dongle inside a shield-box?

[davman]

Hi Ketil,

Can you propose "one level up" when it comes to version of production testing.

The problems I see with using just a dongle is:

• a missing part, chip antenna or a u.fl. connector that popped loose inside the assembly will pair and work fine within a few meters.
• impedance issues caused by a bad PCB will detune the antenna (but still work), possibly violating certifications sending outside allowed freqencies.

I believe there must be alternative, more cost-efficient solutions vs. the 18.000 Euro LitePoint's, that still can cover more than just the most basic function-test?

i.e. like USRP + Gnu-radio anyone?

best David

[Roger Clark]

I very much doubt anyone tests every board for RF compliance.

Whats to say that the loose connection that caused the problem didnt happen in transit when a container or package was dropped.

If you really want to do RF testing, I suspect the receiver would not work very well if you have a component failure in the antenna section.

So you could get your board to initially operate as a Central device and confirm it can receive a connection from another nRf device running in minimum power, perhaps in some sort of controlled environment e.g. semi shielded box arrangement.

If you really want to do RF spectrum measurements on the cheap. I have been investigating using a TV receiver dongle and a satellite TV down converter, plus open source SDR software.

I dont have a link to hand, but I did post the link in relation to analysing traffic on the nRF24, so you could look for that

[run_ar]

@davman, As suggested doing a connection test would show you if you have any RF issues as long as you measure the RSSI of the device under test. So if the rssi is much lower than expected you have an issue.