Summery: A pharmaceutical company headquartered in Raritan, New Jersey with additional facilities in Pennsylvania, California, Canada and Switzerland needed a way to collect data from over 200 different laboratory instrument into its Unix-based LIMS. It would have written custom drivers for each instrument but with debugging and testing this would have been very time consuming. Instead it chose to use WinWedge Pro to interface with all the instruments including lab balances, pH meters, moisture analyzers, temperature sensors and more.
Lab Automation
The company purchased Hewlett Packard’s CHEMLMS LIMS product. The LIMS operates from a UNIX environment and is accessed from workstations running Windows or System 7 (MACs) using an X-Windows terminal emulator. The network operating system is DEC’s Pathworks. The LIMS workstations are on an Ethernet under the network protocols DECNET and TCP/IP stack for DOS nodes and ETHERTALK and TCP/IP for Macintosh nodes. (A thick wire Ethernet splits into thin wire Ethernets to access each workstation).
The Lab Automation Group at the company wrote a VB application that incorporates the WinWedge Pro to acquire data from all the different laboratory instruments. In effect the WinWedge Pro is acting as an easily-configurable multi-instrument device driver. Using WinWedge Pro instead of custom code for each lab instrument saved programming, testing and debugging time. The raw data collected by WinWedge Pro is then transferred via Net DDE and FTP’s PCTCP (network software from FTP Software) into the UNIX server to be utilized by HP ChemLIMS (Hewlett Packard’s LIMS).
Basically WinWedge Pro collects data from over 200 various instruments and makes the data available over the network. HP’s LIMS software then interfaces the data through the network.
LIMS Configuration
Windows PC workstations are set up throughout the research facility to collect data from the various laboratory instruments into the LIMS via TCP/IP connections. The desktop workstations are configured with RS232 ports, a TCP/IP-Ethernet port, FTP PC/TCP (network software from FTP Software), and a DEPCA card (network card from DEC). Where space is very limited laptops are used instead of desktop PCs.
Lab Instruments
Researchers collect data from a wide array of sophisticated laboratory instruments into their LIMS. They use WinWedge and FileWedge (a utility that comes free with WinWedge Pro) for real-time data acquisition from all the instruments that are interfaced to the LIMS, including:
- Electronic Lab Balances Threshold Systems
- PH/ion meters/analyzers
- Titrators
- Spectrometers
- Hardness Testers
- Plate Readers
- Scintillation Counters
- Bubble Surfactometers
- Particle Measuring Systems
- and many other instruments….
In fact they collect data from over 200 instruments in all using WinWedge Pro and from various data files using FileWedge (included with WinWedge Pro).
The WinWedge Pro Solution
The Lab Automation and Engineering Group at the company tested WinWedge Pro and found great versatility in creating different and sophisticated parsing schemes to manipulate the data from all the different instruments. FileWedge was also very useful as some of the raw data for the LIMS originated from files or from contract labs (external labs) not directly from instruments at the research center.
Engineers and automation specialists at the pharmaceutical company said they were particularly pleased with:
- The ability to run multiple instances of WinWedge to collect data from all their instruments instruments though multiple serial ports.
- Ability to interface over 200 different types of laboratory instruments to their LIMS
- The advanced DDE capabilities that enabled the engineers to create sophisticated data collection and device control interfaces.
- It is user-friendly making their job much easier.
- It takes up very little in the way of hard disk space and RAM to operate and store.
- It has low maintenance requirements as TALtech maintains and upgrades the WinWedge software (as needed for new versions of Windows).
- TALtech provides FDA-approved “Software Validation Reports” for its WinWedge Pro.
- Free, helpful and readily available support by phone and email from TALtech.
An engineer who was part of the LIMS task force, adds that “WinWedge has performed consistently and smoothly for our application. I highly recommend it for similar laboratory data collection applications.”
Updated July 2026