BCA and Brookfield have created the most advanced user experience in viscosity measurement by combining the ease of touch screen technology with the world-standard features of Brookfield’s series of DV-II Viscometers and DV-III Rheometers.

Context

Brookfield is known for their superb work in mechanical design and production of their viscometers. Up until this point these designs included push button / character based LCD for the user interface. Brookfield came to us and wanted a modern color graphics LCD which would take their designs into the future. With a long list of requirements including touch screen technology and a tight deadline, BCA worked with the client to develop a program that established not only the right combination of electronics to drive their motor and torque analysis, but also a custom user interface. We had but one year to establish the product. We released the product on time. It was presented with great feedback at the Pittcon Conference 2013.

Solution

BCA worked on several pieces of the design in tandem to keep the project dates on target. The development of the electronics, firmware, and user interface occurred simultaneously. Additionally BCA was designing two models with different size touch screens and features. Code reuse was a must and the products today share the same compile.

There were some complex requirements on the electronics design. AD sample rates were specified in the 10 nanosecond range. The 7” LCD had specific speed requirements. The motor speed accuracy had to be 100%. We chose a Freescale IMX processor to handle the buck of this work. BCA has developed a royalty-free custom operating kernel which has been used in our product development for over 20 years. This finite state machine kernel was perfect for the over 200 states of this software. This allowed BCA to provide a royalty free option that already has support for system alarms, user interface screens with button input, event logging, protected memory access among many other modules.

BCA also has developed a custom tool that allows the user interface of an embedded system to be developed on a PC running Visual Studio. Hardware related events are simulated, thus the application engineers get to work out the user interface issues while providing the client’s marketing department a visual of exactly what the UI looks like. In this case, many user interface requirements were defined and redefined using this SimGUI, well before the first hardware board was fabricated. All this code was written in ’C’, thus it ported directly to the target hardware.

The final product redesign enhanced the ease of use with adding popular features. DV-III has real-time on screen graphing that can be saved to the device, printed directly from the device, or viewed on a PC. Built into the system are math models that can provide rapid data analysis for selectable variables. Data can be transferred via flash drive or a computer can be hooked up directly.