The human factor or how the Fork saved 500 devices that detect cancer

In this article, we will talk about how we saved devices from being thrown into the trash with the help of a test stand on the Fork.
We are developing devices that can detect cancer in the early stages and in January 2021 launched NOTA-personal mole trackers that detect melanoma. In particular, we started testing PCBa NOTA on a functional stand created on the basis of Fork and Puh.

During testing, we found a strange thing: the test that checks Bluetooth shows an error on all boards. For us, it looks like this:
An erroneous test is highlighted in red
Note that production and testing is carried out in China. And we see this information in our office on the other side of the Earth, through our server.
(A bit of advertising: This is easy to do on a Fork, and when you buy a board, we will help you set up such a server).

We begin to deal with manufacturers and…
here you need to go back to December 2020
Before starting any production, you need to send the manufacturer a specification that describes what and where to solder, so that everything works according to the author's idea. We have a special chip-antenna in the specification on the NOTA board, through which Bluetooth transmits the mole survey data to the app on the phone. And just before the launch, it turns out that manufacturers can't get a chip-antenna. We have provided for this problem in advance, so the board has the ability to use not the chip-antenna, but the antenna that is divorced on the board. It has modest characteristics, but they are quite enough to transmit NOTA measurements, since the device does not require a long distance to work.

We made a new documentation where the resistor is soldered differently so that the antenna divorced on the board works, and sent the documentation to production.

But then the human factor intervened: manufacturers used the first version of the specification. It is quite difficult to remotely control what documentation is used. Everything is built on trust: if the manager said that he will send a new specification for production, then we can only hope that the information will really reach.
Back to 2021
...and, as a result, 500 boards were soldered according to the old specification.
Since there is no chip antenna, and the resistor is selected as if it is, and the Bluetooth, respectively, did not work. And the functional stand on the Fork revealed this.
Now our Chinese friends will simply solder the resistors. But that's another story!

P.S. A nice bonus from the server is that we can see online how testing is going, whether it is going at all and how many boards were tested per day. Agree, this is important when the production is thousands of kilometers away from the development engineers!
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