Animated illustration: a 16-well thermal block sits on a circuit board with signals travelling along its traces. When asynchronous mode is on, every well runs its own protocol at its own temperature; when it is off, all sixteen wells cycle together. A strip along the bottom plots the temperature of three wells over time.
GNACODE INC. · Medicine Hat, Alberta, Canada
We design and build electronics and life-science instruments. We take on engineering projects, build devices on our GIOT platform, and supply Minicube, sample-prep and RGX modules for your own instruments.
What we offer Start a project01 What we offer
The same engineers design the boards, the firmware, the thermal control, the fluidics and the optics. That is why we can sell a project, a device or a single module.
Customer-funded development of electronic devices and instruments, from specification and prototype to a tested 0-series and transfer to manufacturing.
Our own board family for measurement and control: a CORE computer, NODE boards for sensors and actuators, one cable bus and a ready data stack. A device built from it starts working long before a new board would.
Building blocks from our Minicube and RGX instruments, supplied as components for your instrument: precision thermal cycling, 90-second sample preparation, fast qPCR and LAMP, and fluorescence detection.
02 Projects
We develop devices and instruments for customers who fund the work. Every project is scoped in phases, and each phase ends with something you can hold, measure or test.
Many projects start from a module we have already built, such as a thermal block, a pump or a detector, or from a set of GIOT boards. That shortens the road to a working prototype.
Analogue front ends, mixed-signal boards, microcontroller firmware and embedded Linux.
Fast heating and cooling, Pt1000 measurement and control loops calibrated against traceable references.
Syringe pumps, pinch valves, peristaltic pumps and capillary flow paths, driven from our own electronics.
Fluorescence excitation and detection, filters, LED collimation and photon-counting silicon photomultipliers.
Machined aluminium and stainless steel, 3D-printed parts, housings and mounting systems.
Control apps, REST interfaces, MQTT messaging, time-series databases and live dashboards.
Requirements and the standards that apply, with the cost of each requirement made visible before it is committed.
A working model, often on GIOT boards, so firmware and data handling start on the first day.
Bench and environmental tests against the specification, with documented results.
A small first batch, built and burnt in, for use by your team and your first customers.
Transfer to our manufacturing partner, or to a certified factory of your choice.
Our manufacturing partner, Gnacode Products Co., Ltd. in Thailand, builds the hardware we design for industrial, environmental and laboratory use. Where a product must be made under a specific certification, we transfer it to a certified factory.
03 GIOT platform
GIOT is our family of eleven boards for measurement and control. A GIOT device is a CORE, the NODE boards it needs, a housing and its application firmware.
Every board speaks the same bus and fits the same mounting pattern, and the data lands in the same dashboards. A new device is mostly a new combination, not a new design.
Measure, control and report. A reference library of 62 NODE-S applications, each runnable in a simulator, is the starting point for new devices.
04 Life science
Minicube and RGX are our own instruments. Their core modules are available to instrument makers as OEM components, or adapted to a new instrument in a project.
Every one of the Minicube's 16 wells for 0.2 ml tubes is its own precisely controlled temperature zone. Sixteen different protocols can run at the same time, and tubes can be added while others are running.
independent wells, each with its own protocol
precision: how well a temperature is repeated
peak heating ramp rate
minutes for 35 cycles of two-step PCR
Automated extraction and purification of DNA and RNA with magnetic beads, delivering a sample ready for amplification in 90 seconds.
RGX joins our sample preparation to fast amplification and detection: qPCR in under 5 minutes, or isothermal LAMP. It has been tested with COVID-19 patient samples.
05 OEM modules
Each module comes from an instrument we built and tested ourselves. We supply it as a component with its documentation, or adapt it to your instrument in a project.
Sixteen independently controlled wells for 0.2 ml tubes, each able to run its own protocol.
A-class Pt1000 inputs, 24-bit measurement, a calibration curve stored for each sensor, and control 100 times a second.
Magnetic-bead extraction and purification of DNA and RNA, ready for amplification.
Amplification with real-time detection: qPCR in under 5 minutes, or isothermal LAMP.
Excitation and emission selectable from 320 to 850 nm, with a low-cost photon-counting silicon photomultiplier readout.
Syringe pump, pinch valves and peristaltic pumps, with drivers on the GIOT bus.
Need a module that is not on the list, or one of these in a different form? That is a project, and it usually starts from a design we already have.
Ask about a moduleModules are supplied for integration into the customer's instrument and for research use. Regulatory approval of a finished diagnostic product rests with the product owner.
06 About
GNACODE INC. is based in Medicine Hat, Alberta, Canada. It was founded by Lars Thomsen, PhD, an electrophysiologist by training and a hardware engineer by practice.
Our engineers have worked together for two decades, across electronics, firmware, mechanics and molecular biology. That mix is what lets one team build a thermal cycler, a data stack and a fluidic system, and make them work together.
At a Danish university hospital in 2017, the Minicube PCR amplified the HIV-2 LTR gene from just 10 copies to a detectable level in 35 cycles.
Minicube and RGX were designed, built and tested by the same team that now supplies their modules.
Our partner in Thailand assembles, brings up and burns in the hardware we design.
07 Contact
Tell us about your project, the device you need or the module you want to build in.