Digital Kanban Cards & Line-Side Displays | Opticon SE-290

Description

Opticon SE-290 — Digital Kanban Cards and Line-Side Displays

Kanban works until the cards stop matching reality. Part numbers change, quantities get rebalanced, a supplier switches, and somewhere there’s a laminated card that nobody updated. The SE-290 turns the card into a 2.9-inch e-paper display driven from the system that already holds the correct data — so the card and the ERP can’t drift apart.

A card that can’t go stale

Every rebalance, every engineering change, every new part number propagates to the relevant displays in seconds from the Opticon ESL Web Server Software. No reprinting, no laminating, no card that survived three revisions because it was in a bin nobody checks. For teams that have run a kanban loop for years, this removes the maintenance burden that quietly erodes the system.

Status, not just data

The SE-290R displays black, white and red; the SE-290RY adds yellow. That’s a three-state visual language without any additional hardware — black for normal flow, yellow for attention or approaching a trigger point, red for stopped, blocked or non-conforming. A supervisor reads the state of a cell walking past it, which is the entire point of visual management and the thing a terminal-based system can never give you.

An addressable andon signal at every location

The high-efficiency RGB LED with adjustable brightness and duty cycle turns each display into an individually addressable signal. Trigger replenishment when a bin crosses its reorder point, light the location of a part a changeover needs, flag a station holding a quality issue, or mark every position affected by a recall. Because the LED is driven centrally, the signal comes from the system state rather than from someone remembering to raise it.

Line-side data without cabling

At 94 x 43.2 x 11.8 mm and 38 grams the SE-290 mounts on bin fronts, rack faces, flow lanes and station boards with a bracket and nothing else — no power drop, no containment, no electrical work in a live production area. Reconfigure a cell and the displays move with it. One base station carries 1,500 displays across a typical 25-metre indoor range, with transmission up to 250 kbps over IEEE 802.15.4.

Survives the things a shop floor does

E-paper is bistable: the image persists with no power applied at all. A power interruption or a flat cell leaves the last correct part number and quantity on the card rather than a blank face, which matters when an operator is mid-cycle. Two CR2450 lithium primaries give approximately five years at room temperature at five updates per day. The display also carries scannable 1D and 2D barcodes, so a card can hold the part number an operator or handheld needs to scan.