One such customer, KBiosystems, manufactures equipment used in detecting COVID variants with its wide range of sample sealers employing 4.3inch and 7-inch display modules. A typical sample tray consists of 225 compartments, which once loaded, requires a foil heat seal to be applied to prevent contamination. The latest designs use Itron (UK) Ltd’s modular system solution with stepper motor drive, temperature measurement and heating sub-modules controlled by the display module operating iDevOS via internal serial CAN and I2C interfaces.
The stepper motor module uses a local AVR CPU and watchdog to, firstly, monitor safety interlocks, to control the motor and to enable heating to provide a fail-safe solution.
Another customer, Monmouth Scientific, manufactures Clean Air Cabinets which guarantee a highly clean environment in which to analyse thousands of swabs from COVID test centres. Both 4.3 inch and 7-inch display modules are used across a range of products to set flow rate, filter change and other parameter settings.