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I am personally a fan of StarTech. I have not used their PCIe adapters, but their USB-RS232 adapters are really good. https://www.startech.com/en-us/cards-adapters/serial-cards-adapters?filter_bustype=pci%20express As far as working with MAX, they just need to be normal COM serial ports and VISA will do the rest.

I think our decision to no longer use TestStand stems from our need to run requirements-driven tests. The sequencer engine we have built takes requirements-level data and translates that to our test system for stimulus application and response measurements. No one at our location was knowledgeable enough to create a similar system so that the only thing we had to change while running a TestStand sequence was to point to the new requirement (no change to the test sequence run through TestStand or the modules TestStand calls). I have a bit of a deeper understanding of how TestStand works now, but am still not comfortable enough with it to create this type of system. One of the reasons I wouldn't want to create sequences in TestStand for each unit is that it isn't a very straight-forward system to use. I don't want to have all of the test engineers on my team required to know TestStand intimately, just as I don't want them to have to know LabVIEW intimately. Everyone should know the basics, a few should have a deeper understanding of the system as a whole, and at least one person knows the whole system intimately. If sequences were translated from our requirement documents to TestStand sequences, everyone on my team who creates unit tests (which is everyone on my team) would need to know TestStand. With our current engine, they need only know Excel. If there were more in-depth classes for how to make higher level architectures work in TestStand, and if TestStand didn't require a menu 3-deep for common functions, I might be more inclined to use it.