All drive interface test equipment available today can thoroughly test a drive and pass or fail it for a particular parameter or parameters. However, while testing drives this way provides data about the individual drive being tested, it does not provides statistical information about the overall manufacturing process. In today’s high volume drive-manufacturing environment, keeping tabs on trends in the process may be the only way to later prevent a catastrophic failure in the process. To understand if the manufacturing process is running correctly, certain data returned by the drive test must be uploaded to a server in near real-time for statistical process control (SPC). If data for a large number of drives is drifting in the wrong direction or falls outside an acceptable range, adjustments can be made to the process or material before individual drives began to fail in mass. Flexstar’s FlexBase is the first critical step in the process of statistical process control.

    Flexstar Technology’s FlexBase was designed to extract data from binary image files generated by the Flexstar ‘Host’ program and export it to a Microsoft Access 2000 database or Excel 2000 workbook. The data can be transferred directly into an Access 2000 database. Data for an Excel 2000 workbook is exported to a delimited text file and imported into the Excel 2000 workbook using a macro. This provides you with the power of Microsoft Office 2000 to sort, search, manipulate, calculate and analyze the image file data. With FlexBase’s powerful filtering capability you can get just the data you want from any one up to 250 image files in a single Excel 2000 workbook.

    FlexBase has the added convenience of unattended data transfer, allowing data to be transferred during continuous drive testing periods.

    Since the data generated by FlexBase is in a standard, delimited ASCII file, it can easily be accessed and analyzed by third party SPC software products.

    FlexBase gives the user the ability to launch Excel 2000 from within the program. Each time that Excel is launched, it loads one of the predefined workbooks as a ‘template’. The template includes a macro ‘macro1’ which is used to import the data from the delimited file created by FlexBase. The specific workbook that gets loaded depends on settings you make within FlexBase, for more information see Selecting a Workbook Template Once the data is imported into the workbook, the data can be manipulated and then saved with a file name specified by the user, for more information see Assigning Workbook Names .