Accordion AGENT

The Accordion framework is the result of decades of experience from designing hardware test interface applications. Every company that manufactures things have this challenge; the product needs to be tested one way or another. In many cases there are need for analog or digital signals/stimuli, different communication protocols such as I2C, SPI, UART, CAN, Modbus or USB. The product needs to be supplied with power, often with the need of testing the battery charging functionality.  Sometimes the test rig needs to be powered as well. 

Every product is unique, a test- and measurement platform developed for one product is either too large (expensive) for one application or too small and limited for another. Different voltage ranges, special connectors and communication buses is the reason why companies often ends up building a “special thing” each time and spends a lot of engineering resources to do it. 

With few established rules, test development can be made up from very specific custom test boards to things purchased on Ebay or AliExpress that creates all kinds of support issues and sourcing problems. Maintenance can be very tricky when years has passed and the parts can’t be sourced or the guy implementing it has left or is busy with the next big product. 

Many companies goes through the same thing; when starting out, manufacturing test is made up by R&D tools and manual testing (often done by the R&D engineers themselves). After the realization that this hurts quality and consumes precious engineering resources, “Santa’s workshop” takes over and test solutions are built from a great mix of custom boards, purchased gadgets and Arduino’s. When the number of active products increases, this becomes unsustainable. Usually it all ends up with building the test solution on very expensive products/measurement equipment and creating a team dedicated to this task. 

This is what makes Accordion™ special – we have thought about this for a long time and have come up with a flexible solution. Accordion™ is modular which means that every system can be equipped with exactly the functionality that is needed. 

We have addressed the common problems and challenges one by one.