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FAQ

Kenneth MacCallum

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Frequenty Asked Questions

Who is StarFish Medical?

StarFish Medical is Canada’s largest medical device design, development and contract manufacturing company. We help medtech innovators throughout North America overcome challenging technology obstacles to create breakthrough products that improve health and save lives.

Is it StarFishDAQ, SFDQ or what?

When we talk about it, we say StarFishDAQ which we pronounce "starfish dack". We use SFDQ as a handy abbreviation when we're writing but mostly we don't spell that out when we say it. It's quicker to just say StarFishDAQ.

Why make another micro based dev board, like an Arduino or whatever?

We have found that in the early phases of product development, it's super handy to quickly throw together common electronic building blocks to derisk ideas early on. We could do this with various off-the-shelf solutions but it's also handy having control of the whole stack, so later in a development program we can customize to best suite the needs of that particular application.
The SFDQ system allows us to quickly throw together tests with motors, heaters, thermistors and all sorts of other elements and perform sophisticated control strategies such as closed-loop feedback, multi-axis trajectory following and data logging.
It's pretty easy to incorporate multiple SFDQs to expand their capacity and to make daughter-boards that add additional functionality. That way we can focus on what new things are needed for a project, rather than designing the whole thing from scratch over and over again.

How can the SFDQ be used?

There are three main modes that the SFDQ system is used. The first is what might be called the "vanilla" mode, which is just grabbing a board, hooking it to an benchtop setup and scripting an experiment. Another mode is to make a custom daughter board and a custom, derivative firmware codebase along with the vanilla Java app to do something a bit special. The final use involves using circuit snippets to make a fully project-specific custom PCB along with custom firmware and custom software.

What sorts of things have been done with a SFDQ system?

The SFDQ has been used for many applications, many of them at the same time. Here's a list of some of the functional capabilities.

  • Stepper motor based motion control
  • 200W closed-loop brushless motor motion control
  • Closed-loop thermal control using heaters and Peltiers
  • Syringe pumps
  • Temperature logging with multiple sensors
  • Closed-loop pressure control using a DC motor based compressor
  • Various valve control experiments and prototypes
  • Microfluidic cartridge actuation, with valves and pumps.

More to come!


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