SiLA (Standardisation in Lab Automation) enables Lab-of-the-Future technology through free and open communication protocols and data standards. Applied Scientific Technologies (AST) have implemented the SiLA 2 communications protocol into a wide range of standard laboratory bench equipment linking them to Deft automatically allowing many bench experimental protocols and applications to be covered including balances, stirrer/shakers, pH and conductivity meters, Rheology and particle counters found in many formulation and R&D labs. The adoption of industry-leading SiLA standards helps to future proof lab equipment by enabling end-to-end integration with LIMS or local area networks via a control App for Android or iOS devices to and by them to connect to each other are share data seamlessly. www.sila-standard.com/
AST are the global specialists for SiLA 2 integration and development and the latest addition to our growing library of laboratory instruments includes a custom SiLA driver for an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) Imagery device.
The OCR Imagery Device enables a way to capture data when a lab instrument does not have a connectivity port. The camera takes an image of the speed, heat, time etc every couple of seconds and sends this data directly to the Deft Gateway.
In some instances, direct data acquisition from common lab equipment is not possible, such as this thermomixer widely used in R&D in many consumer food and beverage formulation labs. To solve this issue, AST have set up a raspberry pi and camera module along with a bespoke lab-friendly mounting system to record the device display without hindering usability. The system uses Google’s open source and neural-network-based `Tesseract’ optical character recognition (OCR) software to capture display parameters. This solution facilitates multilingual data capture from the device, for processing and storage by AST’s Deft.
