21st June 2021

Software Upgrade Allows Water Purification In China

The whole company at GX has been involved from the start of the project, several years ago, to design and development a reliable online analytical toxicity machine. To date GX has built over 70 Microtox® CTM machines.

Following the machines success in tracing contaminated water in Asia the company Modern Water has expanded into China and is looking to deploy more machines there. Previously the instructions to operate had only been available in English – to make it easier to use GX agreed to retrofit Chinese into the operating instructions.

Chinese is a complex language with several dialects and varieties, crucially it is logo syllabic – whereby a character generally represents one syllable. GX initially got all the existing English instructions translated into Chinese here in the UK. Then electronic engineers at GX developed a code that would automatically convert the English instructions into Chinese and defined a font to use.

In choosing a font, the engineering team also had to find a solution to how to define numbers, since within the Chinese font there are no numbers. This anomaly was solved by adding universal numbers so the machine could produce accurate digital information.

Speaking about the retrofit, software engineer James Scott recalls, “Behind the scenes there was lots of recoding to ensure that every variable was considered. I sent countless screen grabs of each instruction panel to check the accuracy so that we could ensure that the readout displayed correct information.”

Having now updated the language facility any subsequent units due to be built will include dual language capabilities. As Mark Helmich, GX’s managing director notes, “Now with a multi-language tool the Microtox ® CTM can be used in any country with their native language.”