Since their release nearly 15 years ago, our Industrial Monitor Pedestal Mounts have been one of our most popular display mounting options. Combined with an industrial touch screen, keyboard, and PC Enclosure, the pedestal base allows placement of a full HMI workstation anywhere on the factory floor.
Underwriters Laboratories (UL) was invited to test our Hazloc-rated displays, Keyboards, and monitor-mounted KVM Extenders for Class I, II, and III, Division 2 hazardous locations and Type 12/4/4X environments (Type 1 for Rack Mount Displays) and we are pleased to report that we now offer 182 industrial products that are rated by UL for hazardous locations!
Hope’s Production Facility in Roswell, GA has been busy preparing for your end of year needs, working hard to ensure that our stock levels are sufficient to meet the increased demand we always see in December. Our warehouse shelves are fully stocked, with most monitors, Keyboards, KVM Extenders, mounting options, and Thin Client/PC Enclosures available to ship immediately!
Model by model, we have been transitioning from traditional CCFL backlights over the past few years, and we are happy to announce that we are now using LED backlighting in all Hope Industrial Systems monitors and touch screens except for our 20″ models, which will be converted later this year.
In an industrial or manufacturing environment it is not uncommon to operate a computer with neither a keyboard or a mouse, using only a Hope Industrial touch screen to control the PC. For these situations we’ve discussed virtual keyboards to simplify data entry, and ways that a touch screen can better emulate a mouse.
As discussed in other posts, we have always used Elo Accutouch resistive touch sensors and controllers in our touch screen models. Aside from the usual benefits of resistive touch sensors, the Elo Accutouch system offers high quality, extremely diverse driver support, and long term compatibility (DOS drivers from 20+ years ago still work with our current RS232 models).
Hope Industrial Displays are built to handle abuse of many forms. Our displays are used in a wide variety of extremely tough environments where they see everything from daily steam cleanings to chemical exposure to the occasional run-in with a forklift.
In most cases, industrial HMI software is designed to run in a full-screen mode, where all the user sees (and can therefore click on using a touch screen) is the HMI application itself. This prevents the user from interacting with the operating system directly and accidentally closing the HMI application, rebooting Windows, or worse.
In our last post we introduced our Raspberry Pi proof-of-concept project and outlined the physical components and setup required for using the Raspberry Pi as an industrial touch screen PC in a harsh environment. Please see our previous post for important information to consider before integrating a Raspberry Pi with our industrial touch screens.
The Raspberry Pi is a small single-board computer originally created by the Raspberry Pi Foundation as an affordable tool for teaching computer science. Due to its low cost, ease of use, and broad community support, the Raspberry Pi is now being used in a variety of diverse settings with users installing them in everything from home automation systems to autonomous aircraft.