CIE Components in Electronics
Lascar Electronics has launched PanelPilotACE, a new hardware and software display platform that enables the rapid development of fully customised industrial and commercial user interfaces and panel meters. PanelPilotACE’s combination of a multifunctional touch-screen colour display with simple drag-and-drop design software removes the need for any coding, cutting development time for even the most advanced displays by months.
The PanelPilotACE Design Studio software provides a number of building blocks to allow users to easily add elements to their project. From background images to text elements, analogue and digital style meters, touch-screen navigation elements and even complex logic statements, users can rapidly build up sophisticated multi-screen interfaces without needing to write a single line of code.
When complete, designs are uploaded to the first PanelPilotACE compatible display hardware, the SGD 43-A, via USB. This display features multiple standard inputs and interfaces, providing the flexibility for users to implement touch-screen navigation, measurement and display of analogue, digital and bus inputs, as well as control of outputs and alarms.
Commenting Ben Savage, PanelPilot Manager at Lascar, said: “PanelPilotACE really does make the development of advanced user interfaces as simple as dragging and dropping all of the elements you want onto a screen. That ease-of-use means that PanelPilotACE is a true blank canvas – enabling users to quickly create, at a fraction of the cost of alternative development paths, an almost unlimited variety of intuitive interfaces.”
The free to download PanelPilotACE Design Studio software comes with a library of pre-defined elements, but users can also create or import their own elements to allow plenty of scope for creativity – enabling the display to be tailored for almost any industrial or commercial application.
The SGD 43-A is designed to be panel mounted, making it easy to integrate into a range of industrial and manufacturing applications and processes, but can just as easily be adapted for other commercial uses – as a touch-screen control panel in medical devices, for monitoring in scientific research, or even as an information display in museums or other public buildings.
The low-profile display features a 4.3” capacitive touch-screen with an ARM 9 processor running embedded Linux. The display is powered either from USB or a 5V to 30V d.c. supply and offers users a wealth of hardware interfaces including four 16-bit bi-polar analogue inputs, eight digital input/output pins, two alarm outputs (max current sink 10mA) and four PWM outputs.
Users can test software on emulated hardware before uploading the designs quickly and easily via USB.
