PolyScience has worked with DMC to develop custom control electronics and user interface for its General Purpose Water Bath upgrade.
The company’s popular General Purpose Water Bath was redesigned with modern features while maintaining the core functionality that has made it so successful. New features include a full-colour display with more comprehensive error handling and alarms and updated control electronics.
DMC designed the upgraded system around a Cortex-M0+ microcontroller. Open-source graphics library LittlevGL was used to efficiently operate the display. It can easily scale from large to small projects, enabling the creation of rich graphics. LittlevGL also provided many useful UI elements out-of-the-box that permitted rapid UI changes. Switching to a full-colour graphical display also gave the end customer multi-language support and a more intuitive interface for controlling and configuring the device.
The existing control algorithm was implemented to ensure the final product achieved the same reliability and performance while adding additional diagnostic and tuning capabilities for the future. DMC upgraded the control electronics to modern, widely available components and additional circuitry was added to enhance the way faults and alarms were displayed and handled.
Features of the redesigned General Purpose Water Bath include:
- Simultaneous display of actual and setpoint temperature
- Programmable presets for frequently used temperatures
- Integrated timer
- Calibration capability
- Primary and automatic safety thermostats
- Modern user interface with a full-colour display
- Informative error messages and improved error handling
- Support for multiple languages
- Optimised design for modern features using low-cost components
- Cost-optimised PCB design for volume production
- STM32 Arm Cortex-M0+ microcontroller
- Control of line-voltage AC loads
- Full-colour TFT display
- LittlevGL graphics library
For more information visit the Polyscience website HERE.
