ChargePoint
An automated Outgoing Quality Control suite — built on the team's in-house test framework — that turned a months-long manual gate into a deterministic, operator-runnable ~1-hour cycle per unit.
- automated OQC per unit, including charging
- ~1 hr
- a stalled manual gate became a per-unit cycle
- Months → 1 hr
- standardized across both charger lines
- AC + DC
Problem
Outgoing Quality Control (OQC) for DC fast chargers was a manual, operator-driven gate: each unit was hand-validated before shipment at the contract manufacturers building them. It was slow and inconsistent from run to run — clearing even a handful of stations dragged on for months — and a hard throughput bottleneck on the line.
Approach
I built the OQC test sequence on our in-house test framework: it powers the unit from a programmable supply, finds the controller on the network over IPv6, then drives commissioning, firmware and image verification, the on-device self-test suite, and system service and fault checks over SSH — gating shipment on a single deterministic pass/fail, with no human judgment in the loop.
— Decisions
Deterministic gating over operator judgment
Pass/fail is decided by the sequence, not a person. Every unit runs the identical steps against the same thresholds, so the shipment gate is repeatable and the run-to-run variance of manual OQC disappears.
One run, three hardware interfaces
The charger exposes different subsystems over SSH, UART, and RS232. The suite speaks all three from a single orchestrated run, so one pass exercises the whole unit instead of stitching together separate manual checks.
Config-driven, not a one-off script
Part-number-to-cable-configuration mapping, externalized pass/fail limits, and timeout/kill-switch polling with automatic system-reset recovery — so operators run it unattended and it generalizes across charger lines instead of being a single-unit script.