The idea to test this obscure build came to my mind when I have gone to Department of Organic Chemistry at Charles University to help them restart our HPLC instruments after lab relocation. That LCD 5000 and LCP 5020 has been delivered 20 years ago and SW and drivers allows them to serve with Windows 10 and 11 today. The Milk-V funded by RISC-V International for our RT and CAN FD PCIe cards tests arrived the same day so I decided to try to combine this alternative control computer to demonstrate that our technologies are fully portable. CHROMuLAN Linux build is experimental still and doing that on RISC-V is maximizing the adventure. But not many others can say that even instruments produced two years ago as well as some 30 years ago are still supported by SW on Linux and Windows and can be connected together to build complete system.

A little from our HPLC instruments design and delivery history. The LC4000 instruments generation design started in 1990 and the first setup has been delivered to a customer (IOCB) in 1992. It has been based on Intel 8051 + 32kB EPROM and 32 kB SRAM. Then we updated to Philips 80552 (i.e. the HPLC pump LCP5020). The archival of SW51 Firmware for curiosity mostly at PiKRON’s sw51-pbproj GitLab. Our first ARM7TDMI based component has been used in instrument set forming Automatic amino Acid Analyser AAA 400 (together with pumps and other components based on 8051). Then we have switched to NXP LCP1768 (i.e. in LCP5024). We have started to use LPC4088 on LX_CPU board for HPLC and motion control and robotic applications. The new controllers are prepared to be based on Cortex-M7 ATSAMV71. Some initial info is available in our presentation about LX_RoCoN use at ESA and Airbus (Tracking 75 GHz satellite beacon using PiKRON LX-RoCon motion control unit and digital radio). All our HPLC systems starting from 1990 talk the same RS-485 multi-master open-source protocol uLAN protocol which provides device dictionary introspection, fully deterministic distributed arbitration up to 64 devices with round-robin property up to 16 devices. More in separate presentation uLAN Open RS-485 Communication Protocol, 30 Year of Service in Laboratories, Healthcare and Agriculture.