Bunnie on quality control (in China)
Andrew 'Bunnie' Huang's series on making stuff in China is interesting. He mentions a very cool trick in his quality control entry about automated testing: logging all test data then sending it back to the home base for analysis.
I designed and built the test hardware for these motorized skylights and the autofocus board for these CCTV magnifiers - and this could have made life much easier. Neither of my testers even had network cards, and the second didn't involve a PC at all - it was all done with an Atmel AVR - as involving a PC the first time had made life difficult when transporting the whole unit around. Nowadays you can save so much time and gain huge amounts of debuggability (and loggability, as Bunnie demonstrates) by starting with a cheap laptop and a bunch of USB ADCs...