Professional experience at Neways Expanding Technologies

Jonas Claes -

About Neways Expanding Technologies

Neways is an international innovator in electronics for smart mobility, connectivity and semicon solutions.

With more than 50 years’ experience and strong engineering power, we are proud to act as technology innovation partner for the most demanding customers in the industry. Neways develops and produces electronics that facilitate major trends around global ESG themes. Our team of more than 2,500 specialists across the Netherlands, Germany, USA, China, Czech Republic and Slovakia enables future solutions for EV charging, electric power trains, digitizing health solutions, sustainable agriculture, producing microchips and more.

My professional activities at Neways Expanding Technologies

I have worked at NEXT as a Test Engineer Intern from July 2022 until September 2022. As a test engineer I had several duties of which I have listed the most important ones:

  • Perform maintenance to existing testing hardware and software
  • Improve existing tests for easier operation or enhanced speed
  • Design and build new tests
  • Resolve issues and repair tests in production
  • Communicate with colleagues about strategies and ideas
  • Teach colleagues about new software and explain what I changed and what impact those changes (could) have

In the two months that I have worked at NEXT I have also learned a lot from my fellow test engineers. Where I am more focused on software, their focus is more onto the hardware itself. This has proven to be an ideal combination between me and my colleagues, allowing us to work far more efficiently and resolve issues more quickly.

This cooperation has also allowed me to gain knowledge and experience about the hardware that is produced at NEXT and get more insights into the functioning of electronic circuits in general.

Projects

In the time I spent at NEXT I have had the chance to work on several projects myself. A few notable ones include the on-boarding of a new client's product, moving an old, user-unfriendly test over to a new platform and improving the automation of an existing test.

The old, user-unfriendly test that I have moved over to a new platform was based on Ubuntu 18.04 and was performed using only bash-scripts. As you can imagine, this does not make it user-friendly, especially for new employees.

That is why I have taken on the mission to make this a better test. I began by mapping out how the existing test worked, inside and out. After I knew how everything worked, I wrote detailed documentation on how the existing test worked.

Then I started thinking about possible solutions that would be easy to integrate, user-friendly and easily adaptable by my fellow colleagues. The outcome of this was a Python based test, using the Google OpenHTF library and the web interface included with this library. I then started porting over the bash-scripts into Python code in the framework. I have also used Selenium in order to automate the test further by leveraging the web browser to perform certain tasks automatically.

Once the test was completed I started teaching my colleagues on how the library worked, what it's features are and how they could change the test. I have also written examples to be able to explain to my colleagues on how things worked in a simple manner.

I have also created a solid base for further development by integrating power supplies, multimeters and NEXT specific hardware into a versatile Python library called "InstrumentPy". This library allows developers to add a power supply or a testing platform to their test without the hassle of figuring out the commands to send to the device at hand.

Summary

All in all, I have learned a lot from this experience, had some great times with my colleagues and have worked on my professional network.