I am slowly moving to building automatic test jigs for most of the 
products, so staff (or I) can test them in an automatic fashion.  Most 
of these so far have been built as one-off designs.... but that's 
getting old fast.

I think my job would be a lot easier if I could come up with a piece of 
'pin reading' circuitry I could easily step and repeat for *lots* of 
pins, that would let me both read the voltage of each pin, plus try to 
drive it to a certain voltage level.   Of course, this needs to be 
relatively indestructable, with voltages up to around 30V on current 
products, and 50-60V on coming ones.   Most of the pins I either need to 
wiremap (I.E. verify connected to another pin on another connector, and 
only that pin), or verify connection to a voltage or ground.   For ones 
with more exotic needs, I can do one-off circuitry to measure the more 
critical waveforms.

The thought I had was a DAC through a current limiting resistor to the 
pin, and another resistor from the pin to an ADC.  That would work for a 
lot of it, but it seems rather crude for some reason.

Has anyone played with some sort of 'universal pindriver' for automatic 
test purposes like I describe?   Does the ADC/DAC pair sound reasonable?

-forrest
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