FixturFab + Nominal Connect
Circuit board testing with Nominal Connect + FixturFab bed-of-nails fixtures
Today, test is the critical bottleneck between what we build and what we achieve.
Designs get shipped out and prototypes arrive, but that first power-on oftentimes requires a bed-of-nails fixture, instrument racks, and custom software. Building a test stack in-house can take weeks or months away from an engineering team’s busy schedule, making product validation a significant roadblock to quick iteration and turnaround.
Best-in-class test infrastructure is the key to accelerating hardware progress. Both Nominal and Fixturfab are working on this singular mission: accelerate test. Test should be safe, repeatable, automated, traceable, and seamless. Nominal and FixturFab are making this a reality.
FixturFab provides mechanical fixtures, turnkey test systems, and software support for sourcing, configuring, and designing tests. Nominal Connect provides the custom test applications and UIs to streamline read/write workflows and stream data to Nominal Core, our cloud-based timeseries database and analysis platform. In this post, we break down how engineers can use Nominal Connect together with FixturFabs’ products to accelerate test & validation.
FixturFab’s best-in-class circuit board test fixtures
FixturFab tackles the pain of testing head-on with an integrated platform for building & operating your hardware test stack:
Mechanical fixtures: FixturFab offers quick-turn development jigs for early boards, rugged production clamshells for high-volume lines, and a middle-ground “Dev Pro” option. All use laser-cut probe plates and alignment tooling, so you can simply drop a PCB in and start probing.
Turnkey test systems: Desktop or rack enclosures that bundle power supplies, DMMs, relay matrices, safety interlocks, and calibrated wiring.
Flexible software stack: Open-source Python libraries that handle instrument I/O, test sequencing, and real-time result logging. Scripts you write for prototypes can run unchanged on the production line.
FixturFab Studio: A web portal where you upload CAD or Gerbers, get automated test design feedback, configure fixture options, and track documentation. Streamline your hardware testing with one unified platform for sourcing any solution – from fixtures to turnkey systems – for prototypes through production. FixturFab is moving fast here – stay tuned for new updates!
Why this matters
Speed – FixturFab claims its platform can cut test-development lead time by up to 80%. That can bring a multi-iteration consumer-electronics program to market months earlier, or let a hardware startup ship revision-B boards before the runway runs out.
Consistency from proto to production – Using the same fixture geometry, instrumentation drivers, and test APIs across life-cycle stages eliminates “works-on-my-bench” surprises and simplifies ECO roll-outs.
Lower total cost – Outsourcing only the probe plate still leaves you integrating power rails, relays, and code yourself. FixturFab’s all-in approach bundles those costs – and the risk – into a predictable line item.
Who’s using it?
Customers range from IoT startups flashing firmware on ten boards a week to large automotive suppliers running pneumatic clamshells on 24/7 conveyor lines. Because the mechanical footprint is standardized and the software is Python-centric, engineers can start small and scale without ripping up infrastructure allowing them to enjoy continuous integration, automated testing, and cloud analytics.
FixturFab brings velocity to PCB validation - in an industry where time-to-test is becoming the new time-to-market.
Nominal Connect + FixturFab
Manually probing every board with a DMM and scope would burn hours. So we paired FixturFab’s pogo‑pin fixture with Nominal Connect to create a reusable test‑app that runs PCB test suites in minutes. To test out the bed-of-nails, we used this FixturFab test PCB:
And we’ll run a suite of tests including, but not limited to:
short detection
voltage measurement
GPIO functionality verification
USB functionality verification
To do this, the bed of nails will probe the underside of our PCB at certain points and check path resistances, apply voltage and measure potentials, and verify communication protocols are all within spec. For example, to ensure the the 5V potential on the board is not shorted to ground, the device measures the continuity between the 5V probe and a GND probe: if there is no continuity, we’re in the clear.
The test logic lives on the FixturFab itself, while the configured Nominal Connect GUI displays the test results. To learn more about how to write a test suite and view your test results using FixturFab’s hardware, visit FixturFab documentation here.
Custom Nominal Connect app for FixturFab
The Nominal Connect App we built to test our circuit board poses as a configurable GUI connected to a python backend with test cases written by the user.
After a successful login, all test info and configured settings will appear - you can update the current profile with different test plans, admin status, and passwords using the “Update Profile” button. To log into a different profile, simply enter in the details in the login section and run “Login”. The bottom panel shows the current run. To start a run, simply enter the DUT Serial Number and click “Start Test”. As the test runs, the results of each test will appear on the right hand side.
In the Runner tab within Settings, you’ll see all the crucial connection details for your test runner including the Frontend, Backend, and Pytest‑container IP addresses so that you can pipe data in over WebSocket.
The Previous Runs panel at the bottom of the test app lets you review every run from the current session, then selectively download the ones you want to keep or wipe the ones you don’t.
Pass vs Fail
Now, testing the app on an actual piece of hardware, we get the following result:
In less than 30 seconds we were able to detect that something is wrong with our board - it’s not receiving power to the 5V rail… back to the drawing board!
After some debugging, we think we’ve solved the issue and we slide our PCB back into the tester.
Nice! We’ve got the board working now - onto the next one!
All of this data will be streamed, indexed, and stored in Nominal Core, where engineers can explore the data deeper, observe historical trends, and trace components through the entire development lifecycle.
Conclusion
By bridging FixturFab’s reliable hardware with Nominal Connect’s Python‑driven test runner, we collapsed board‑bring‑up time and killed the two biggest bottlenecks in functional testing: human error and poor traceability.
If your team is still juggling probes by hand, it’s time to let FixturFab and Nominal Connect do the probing while you get back to designing the next board.