Fragmented Test Data

As a product design engineer, I would often find myself wanting to compare data points across assemblies to educate a design decision or find the root cause of a problem. For example: if I were building a drone, I may have wanted to compare top-level flight performance data such as autopilot navigation accuracy against data collected at the sub-assembly level on the cameras. While the cameras are all physically attached to the drones it often felt like these datasets were separated by a brick wall!

Often answering a simple question like “Is there a correlation between navigation accuracy and camera calibration coefficients?” would require half a dozen exports for various sub-assemblies, manual joins using Excel, or custom Python scripts. Data names were inconsistent across suppliers or simply were captured for some parts. Retests would further contaminate the analysis. 30 minutes later I would finally get the desired analysis, just to repeat the process the next day. It was a massive pain.

That’s why I am super excited to announce the release of the Grid Builder, Serial’s simple way to analyze data for any part in your assembly! A way to see population-level data while preserving links between your components.

The Grid Builder

Our goal with the grid builder was to give engineering and operations the ability to easily compare data for any population of assemblies and structure it in a way that reflects how those assemblies were actually built.

Here are the key features

• Available Data: checks all sub-assemblies of the component and pulls all available data
• Search Data: by component, data type or key name
• Auto Linking: sub-assembly identifiers are automatically added to the table
• Multiple Links: multiple rows are rendered for multiple copies of sub-assemblies
• Filtering: by any data point that can be added to the analysis
• Save Views: to re-run later or share with others
• Export: data in the exact format of the grid

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Final Thoughts

Serial’s goal is to empower engineers to design beautiful products and change the physical world and we know the Grid Builder is going to make it easier than ever to find the data needed to make critical decisions.

We’d love to hear any feedback or feature requests, so don’t hesitate to reach out. If you want to test drive Serial, just book a demo.