Yes, that happens often. Another example... quite common...was the disgruntled consumer who complained that a brand new set of batteries for his flashlight were no good. We changed a blown bulb for him and hel calmed down.
To be fair to the previous investigators, none of them were trouble shooters...they were parachuted into a situation which was sporadic in nature because of the two sets of tooling which could be installed in a random fashion. In Liaison Engineering, when something goes wrong you have to come up with a fix "toute suite"...management expects fast answers even 'though they look down their noses at the "Quick Fix" crowd (Liaison Engineers).
It's a common assumption; people tend to believe that components are bad. Even when you have evidence to the contrary, it's easier to blame a component than a process or a tool. This issue is magnified when you have a marginal design, one that only works when a component is at its nominal rather than one end of the tolerance. I had an issue with a board that would not come out of Reset because the supervisory chip was holding the part in Reset. Technicians, the Production Manager, even Purchasing all believed that the supervisory chip was at fault because they could replace the chip and the circuit would come to life. A quick look at the spec. sheet showed that the pull-up resistor used for the supervisory chip was far too weak. Even after demonstrating that components once removed as failed were now operating properly, they refused to believe that the problem was not a faulty component, after all, the circuit had worked through two years of production without issue. I guess the cure would have been telling them that the pull-up resistor was a faulty component and needed to be replaced.
John, as Gelnn said, this is a good example of not making assumptions. Your predecessors all assumed that the test harness was fine. That is often where there is a problem. Again, check the whole chain starting from where the failure occured.
John, as Gelnn said, this is a good example of not making assumptions. Your predecessors all assumed that the test harness was fine. That is often where there is a problem. Again, check the whole chain starting from where the failure occured.
John, as Gelnn said, this is a good example of not making assumptions. Your predecessors all assumed that the test harness was fine. That is often where there is a problem. Again, check the whole chain starting from where the failure occured.
It is interesting that none of your predecessors seemed to have taken the time to check to see if the rejected batteries were actually rejects. There is an old saw about 'assuming'. The problem is not 'assuming'. The problem is not recognizing what assumptions you are making, and then not reviewing those assumptions to see if they are valid.
As energy efficiency becomes more and more a concern for makers of electronics devices, researchers are coming up with new ways to harvest energy from sound vibration, footsteps, and even electromagnetic fields in the air.
The government wants to study your brain, and DARPA wants to use similar information to give robots true autonomy beyond any artificial intelligence developed to date. Sound like science fiction? It's not.
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