What this is

A browser-based process twin — a physical analog of a benchtop workflow, configurable per workspace. Each station on the counter represents a real piece of equipment — analytical balance, UV-Vis spectrophotometer, HPLC system, sample storage, and the wet-prep stations between them. Operators interact with the twin the way they would in person: drag a sample onto a pan, watch the readout settle, blank the spectrophotometer, run a scan.

The twin is intentionally just a twin of the equipment. It has no workflow logic, no SOP enforcement, no chain-of-custody bookkeeping. Those concerns live in L7 Informatics ESP (or whichever LIMS / MES / workflow system you orchestrate from). The bench responds to commands and reports state; orchestration happens elsewhere.

Theory of operation

Each instrument has three views:

• A live miniature on the counter showing real-time state — readouts, LEDs, lamp glow — at a glance.
• A detail view (click the instrument) showing a full-size SVG representation with all the interactive controls and live data displays.
• An embedded controls panel at the bottom of the detail view, styled like the touchscreens you see on modern lab hardware. Same buttons appear in the hover-expand drawer attached to each asset's status card.

Cross-screen state — environmental sensors, the I/O console — flows through a small event bus. The bus currently uses BroadcastChannel for zero-setup multi-window coordination on a single machine. When the backend exists, the bus swaps for a WebSocket client and call sites stay the same.

View modes

Use the All / Left / Right switcher to split the bench across two monitors. The wall and console stay visible on every screen so both views see the same activity. Stations are grouped by process role: prep stations on the left (storage, balance, volumetric), analytical instruments on the right (filter, UV-Vis, HPLC).

Status

DONE Room scene, lab atmosphere, two-screen split view

DONE Cross-screen event bus (BroadcastChannel today, WebSocket-ready)

DONE Environmental sensor panel with integration hook for real hardware

PARTIAL Two fully interactive instruments: analytical balance and UV-Vis

PARTIAL ESP integration (overlay placeholder with iframe-loader for real ESP URL)

NEXT HPLC with realistic pump/autosampler/column/detector animation and live chromatogram building

NEXT Real Python/FastAPI backend per instrument; bus migrates to WebSocket

LATER Volumetric prep, filtration, and sample-storage stations as interactive UIs

LATER Instructor admin panel for fault injection (degrade column, fail electrode, drift balance)

LATER Industrial protocol exposure (OPC-UA endpoints per instrument) for realism

Why this approach

Real instruments are expensive, consumable-hungry, and break in ways that interrupt training and production rather than enrich it. A process twin reproduces the discipline (sample prep, tare procedure, blanking, calibration, documentation) without the consumables, gives the instructor a fault-injection lever for teaching troubleshooting, and integrates cleanly with the same LIMS / MES workflows users will encounter on real equipment.

The aesthetic — light instrument bodies on a dark counter, brand-plate labels, settling jitter on the balance, EMG-shaped spectral peaks — is deliberate. Pedagogically useful realism, not a video game.