Software for automation in the lab

One of my favorite hobbies is writing code and software to automate various tasks in the lab – ranging from routine analysis to grab data using different instruments. I use python and LabView to develop these. I have developed a number of small programs. Here I am mentioning two sorts of bigger projects that turned out to be quite useful in our lab nowadays.

SIMPLE 2D Sweep

Here SIMPLE 2D Sweep stands for a Single Inclusive Measurement Platform in LabVIEW for Every 2D Sweep. As the name suggests, the idea was to develop a program which will act like an interface, where one can add any instruments one wants. So once developed, a student can utilize all the already developed nice features of the software without doing much extra repetitive coding again and again. At the end it turned out that this program itself is quite self sufficient with these features:

  • Choosing arbitrary number of instruments at will from the inventory.
  • Ability to incorporate a new instrument is straight forward.
  • Automatically save and load configuration file.
  • Ability to do measurement in multidimensional parameter space.
  • This program can act as a slave of master of other LabVIEW program. So all the ability of this program is easily transferable to other program.
  • Advanced error handling and logging.
  • Export live data via datasocket server to any other software.

QuickPlot

This is another LabVIEW based program which we use to create color scale plots and line plots within a few clicks from a data file generated by S2DS (this works for any text file as long as the data is saved in columns format). This allows us to look at the data instantly (even when the measurement is still on). This is particularly useful for quick discussion over the data. We keep on adding additional features which often come very handy.