INDUSTRY FOCUS EDITOR’S INTERVIEW
MONITOR, CONTROL, AUTOMATE Mantra of the 21st century
Michelle Winny, Editor of Electronics talks to Richard Cameron, managing director of Lascar about digital displays, data logging and custom instrumentation solutions and their evolution across four decades of technical innovation
F
orty years ago and the electronics landscape was quite a different place
to what it is today. Richard Cameron, MD of Lascar Electronics, a leading provider of digital displays, data loggers and custom instrumentation talks about the company’s origins back in 1977: “Brian Currie, who founded the company, started life in the REME (Royal Electrical & Mechanical Engineers) regiment - where he was first introduced to electronics through technology like radar systems. When he left the army, he joined RS Components’ sales team and five years after that, having identified what he thought were some gaps in the supply market, established his own company selling power supplies and voltmeter displays.” The company has changed significantly in the forty years since its inception. What was originally a husband and wife team in a garage in Billericay has grown to become a global test & measurement
company with hundreds of standard products as well as a healthy portfolio of custom instruments designed and manufactured for third parties. The company now operates from four locations in the UK, US and Hong Kong with over 170 employees as well as a network of over 100 distributors and resellers. “Forty years is a long time in electronics and never more so than the last 40,” explains Richard. “What started as a range of simple voltmeter displays has grown to include a large number of capacitive, resistive and e-paper touchscreen displays. What we first ‘displayed’, we now also record and monitor so from displays, the range has also morphed into a broad offering of IoT and data acquisition products – many viewable from the company’s own Cloud; And as we’ve became better at designing and making our own products profitably, so others wanted to replicate that. Today, we also design and manufacture a large number of test and measurement instruments for others”.
we might be dealing with a museum conservator needing to measure humidity levels in a display case or a nurse that needs to track the temperature of vaccines in a fridge. Convergence of markets happens when a vaccine fridge manufacturer decides to integrate an OEM-style data logging display. Working for a company that understands the ‘need’ and the design path you walk to get there, is pretty interesting.” Speaking about emerging markets and
Speaking of the markets the company currently serves, Richard elaborates. “The markets for displays and loggers do sometimes converge but there are some considerable differences in both audiences. That’s inevitable I think when you supply both components and end user products. As you’d expect, our displays find themselves used in
Process & Control markets, Automotive, Test & Measurement to name a few and the traditional audience continues to be the OEM Design Engineer. Loggers are different. We’ve moved to an audience of people that have a monitoring need rather than a design idea. So instead of an engineer looking to populate a PCB,
Figure 1:
Lascar's display family combines a mix of customisable, touchscreen displays with a series of mid and entry level LCD, LED, 4-20mA, temperature and data displays for use in sensors, process control and test & measurement applications
their evolution, Richard points out, “IoT is making people realise that everything can be measured and monitored. This results in an ever increasing need to have infrastructure that can cope with large volume real time data. It’s not enough to know how many people walk into a shop. We need to control their experience from heating and air quality to the music played throughout the store. The same can be said of production efficiency. Now the automation of these things may be calculated by a human – tomorrow AI may determine it. It’s exciting times”, he says.
Figure 2:
Richard Cameron, managing director of Lascar
THE ROAD AHEAD Looking towards the future, Richard is optimistic, “Onwards and upwards. Our markets are crowded. There’s always someone snapping at your heels and our adage has always been to outsmart and out develop the competition. IoT is clearly influencing industrial and commercial mindsets and so much of our development is geared towards developing our own IoT monitoring systems for a more educated and demanding customer base. This year will see a lot of progress in our Cloud offering – a richer online feature set and also more hardware being added to its line- up. On the display side, we’re committed to expanding the number of protocols our products can communicate with. We can only expand their popularity when they meet the needs of more people.”
Lascar
www.lascarelectronics.com T: 01794 884567
/ ELECTRONICS ELECTRONICS | SEPTEMBER 2018 15
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52
