Answers, including the ones that lose work

A paid assessment is $3,500 to $5,000 and takes two weeks, and a complete benchtop test set for one product line runs $15,000 to $40,000. Everything in between is published on the services page with a price against it. Fixed bids are estimated hours times rate times a contingency factor, and I track what each job actually took against what I bid it at, which is the only way the next number gets better.

Because a free quote on an unscoped test system is a guess, and you pay for the guess later in change orders. Two weeks of paid work produces a real architecture, a real bill of materials, driver coverage confirmed instrument by instrument, and a fixed price for the build. You can take that document to another integrator if you want to. The point is that you own a scoped project either way.

Work up to $10,000 is 50 percent on signing and 50 percent on acceptance, net 30. Larger builds move to 40 percent on purchase order, 40 percent at acceptance, and 20 percent at commissioning. You buy the hardware on your own purchase orders from my bill of materials, so there is no markup on instruments and no floated cash.

No. The platform is Python, and the NI instrument drivers run on the free driver runtimes, so a deployed station costs nothing per seat and nothing per year. If your project genuinely requires TestStand, deployment licenses are passed through at cost as a line on the bill of materials rather than marked up.

Yes, and the sensible way to start is a migration pilot at $6,000 to $10,000 where I port one sequence end to end and prove the pattern on your hardware. From there TestStand can stay as the executive and call Python modules, so the transition is gradual and nothing gets switched off before its replacement works. Sequences move as they come up for change rather than in one risky cutover.

Test software and test systems: benchtop functional testers, ATE racks, results and traceability systems, instrument drivers, and robot-tended test and inspection cells. Right now the work that fits best is software-dominant and remotely executable with a deadline in weeks rather than days. Rack builds and on-site commissioning are scheduled deliberately rather than squeezed in.

Testral Core is the software platform every system is built on: a hardware abstraction layer, a pytest-based sequencer, a results database, an operator interface, and a report generator. Roughly 60 to 70 percent of any given project comes from that core and the remaining 30 to 40 percent is the custom edge, meaning your fixtures, your product, and your tooling. That ratio is why fixed prices are possible at all.

Testral Cell is the hardware side: standard rack configurations and robot-tended test and inspection cells running the same Testral Core software. A cell typically pairs a collaborative robot with a vision system and a test rack, with a documented safety risk assessment against RIA R15.06 and ISO/TS 15066 in the scope. Cells start with a feasibility study, because the payback number should exist before the purchase order does.

Yes. On-site work runs across three hubs where this kind of manufacturing is concentrated: the Springfield and Pioneer Valley corridor, northern Connecticut and the Hartford aerospace belt, and greater Boston out along the Mass Pike. Integration, commissioning, and factory acceptance happen on your floor. Development, driver work, migrations, and reporting happen remotely, because that is faster and cheaper for you, and it is most of the hours on most projects. Remote work is nationwide.

Within 24 hours, stated upfront rather than promised vaguely. Status arrives as one written email a week, which beats a standing meeting for a project you are not running day to day. Calls happen at lunch or after five.

One engineer, taking select projects, which is exactly why the scopes are small and fixed. That is an advantage when your problem is that you need hands on a defined piece of work, and a disadvantage if you need twelve people on site next Monday. If the second one is your situation, say so on the first call and I will tell you.

Yes: general liability, professional liability, a certificate of insurance on request, and a W-9 ready. The master services agreement carves out the platform as pre-existing intellectual property, you own the deliverables and get a license to what sits underneath, liability is capped at fees paid, and acceptance is objective and written. If you have your own paper, I will read it and tell you what I need changed.

Every major measurement class has a first-party Python driver on a free runtime: nidaqmx for DAQ, nidmm for multimeters, niscope for digitizers, nidcpower for source measure, nifgen for generation, niswitch for switching, nidigital for pattern, plus Pickering official Python. Anything that speaks SCPI is reachable through PyVISA, and units under test are reached with pyserial, python-can, or pymodbus. The full list, including where Python does not reach, is on the platform page.

LabVIEW FPGA targets, LabVIEW Real-Time targets such as cRIO, and some of the newest RF instruments still need LabVIEW, and deployment stays on Windows because NI Linux support is partial. This gets verified instrument by instrument during a paid assessment, before a fixed price is signed, rather than discovered afterwards. Publishing the gaps is cheaper for both of us than finding them in week six.

Yes. The entire framework runs against simulated devices, using nidaqmx simulated devices created in NI MAX, the simulate option on the NI driver sessions, and PyVISA-sim for SCPI instruments. That means most of the build happens before your hardware is free, and integration on your iron is a short window rather than a long occupation of your bench.

You own the deliverables: your sequences, your fixtures, your configuration, your data. The underlying platform stays mine as pre-existing intellectual property and you get a license to use it, which is what keeps the price down, because you are not paying to rebuild a hardware abstraction layer that already exists. You get readable source either way, and no part of the arrangement stops your own engineers from maintaining the system.