Real-Time Test Monitoring with TofuPilot

Real-Time Test Monitoring with TofuPilot

By the time you open last week's test report, the damage is done. Real-time monitoring means seeing test results as they happen, so you can react to problems in minutes instead of days.

Why Real-Time Matters

A test station starts failing at 10 AM. Without real-time monitoring, nobody notices until the quality engineer pulls the weekly report on Friday. That's 4.5 days of potentially bad units moving downstream.

With TofuPilot's live dashboards, the yield drop shows up immediately. The engineer investigates at 10:15 AM, finds a worn pogo pin on Station 3, and fixes it by 11 AM. Three bad units instead of three hundred.

Setting Up Live Monitoring

Step 1: Connect Your Test Stations

Every test station pushes results to TofuPilot as runs complete. The data appears on dashboards within seconds.

from tofupilot import TofuPilotClient

client = TofuPilotClient()

# Results appear on the dashboard immediately after this call
client.create_run(
    procedure_id="FINAL-FUNCTIONAL",
    unit_under_test={"serial_number": "UNIT-9921"},
    run_passed=True,
    steps=[{
        "name": "Power On Self Test",
        "step_type": "measurement",
        "status": True,
        "measurements": [{
            "name": "boot_time_ms",
            "value": 342,
            "unit": "ms",
            "limit_high": 500,
        }],
    }],
)

Step 2: Open the Live Dashboard

The procedure dashboard in TofuPilot shows:

• Run feed: Latest runs appear at the top as they come in. Green for pass, red for fail.
• Rolling FPY: Yield calculated over a sliding window (last 50 runs, last 24 hours, etc.)
• Measurement trends: Live-updating charts for each measurement parameter.

Put this on a monitor near the production floor. When the feed turns red, everyone sees it.

Step 3: Monitor Multiple Stations

If you run multiple stations for the same procedure, the dashboard shows results from all of them. Color-code or filter by station to spot station-specific issues.

What to Monitor

Yield (FPY)

The first number to watch. Track it at three time scales:

• Hourly: Catches sudden problems (fixture failure, bad component reel)
• Daily: Shows shift-to-shift variation
• Weekly: Reveals longer-term trends (gradual fixture wear, seasonal effects)

Failure Modes

When a run fails, TofuPilot records which step and measurement caused the failure. The failure pareto updates in real time, showing you the current top failure modes.

If a new failure mode suddenly appears at the top of the pareto, something changed. Investigate immediately.

Measurement Values

Even for passing units, track the actual measured values. A measurement that's drifting toward its limit is a future failure waiting to happen.

TofuPilot's measurement trend chart shows each reading as a dot, with spec limits drawn as horizontal lines. When dots start clustering near a limit line, it's time to act.

Cycle Time

Test cycle time tells you about station health. If a test that normally takes 45 seconds starts taking 90 seconds, something is wrong (instrument communication timeout, retry loop, slow fixture actuation).

Responding to Real-Time Alerts

When the dashboard shows a problem:

1. Check the failure mode. What measurement is failing? Is it one measurement or multiple?
2. Check the station. Is the problem on one station or all stations? One station means a fixture or instrument issue. All stations means a product or process issue.
3. Check the timing. When did it start? What changed at that time (new component lot, shift change, fixture service)?
4. Act. If it's station-specific, take the station offline and inspect. If it's product-wide, hold the batch and investigate the component or process change.

Real-Time vs. Batch Monitoring

Production Floor Setup

For maximum visibility, set up a dedicated monitoring display:

1. Mount a screen visible from the test area
2. Open TofuPilot's procedure dashboard in a browser
3. Set the time filter to "last 24 hours"
4. Auto-refresh keeps the data current

Operators and engineers can glance at the screen between test runs. When something goes wrong, the red indicators are unmistakable.