RoboFlux Code Documentation

A Raspberry Pi powered differential scanning calorimeter with Internet remote control functionality. This documentation serves to explain the source code for the Robot Chemistry course assessment, rather than aiming to be a concise reference to the API.

Other pages of this document are semi-automatically generated using Sphinx from documentation strings within the code. These doc strings are very detailed and explain various functions and methods without the need to examine the code block itself. However if you would like dig deeper, there are links to view highlighted source code next to this documentation.

The source code for this project is also available at its GitHub repository.

There are mainly three parts of code to make this project possible.

Raspberry pi code

Performs hardware control, temperature ramping, PID control and measuremets. Also uploads measurement to the web server via HTTP.

Written and tested on Python 3.6 with asyncio module for asynchronicity. Also makes use of the following Python libraries:

• RPi.GPIO, the GPIO board control library from raspberry pi
• dateutil, a date and time parser that converts a Python datetime object to a string
• Adafruit_ADS1x15, an analog-to-digital converter library from the manufacturer, Adafruit
• w1thermsensor, a 1-wire thermocouple reader library

Raspberry Pi Documentation

• Hardware controls, hardware.py
• Classes, classes.py
• Utility, utils.py
• Main module, main.py
• Settings files
  • local_settings.py
  • settings.py

File Structure

.
├── __init__.py
├── classes.py
├── dependencies.txt
├── from_hayley_unchanged
│   ├── DSC.py
│   ├── Heat_to_setpoint_lily.py
│   └── pid.py
├── hardware.py
├── local_settings.py
├── main.py
├── settings.py
├── tree.txt
└── utils.py

Web Server

Manages a database of calorimetry job measurements. Responsible for facilitating the exchange of information and instructions between user and the raspberry pi.

Powered by Python 3.5, django and django-rest-framework. Server is run by gunicorn and nginx on Ubuntu 16.04.

Django Server Documentation

• Database models
• JSON serializers
• HTTP Response logic

File Structure

server_side/
├── app
├── controls
│   ├── __init__.py
│   ├── admin.py
│   ├── apps.py
│   ├── models.py
│   ├── serializers.py
│   └── views.py
├── manage.py
├── package.json
├── rfsite
│   ├── __init__.py
│   ├── local_settings.py
│   ├── production_settings.py
│   ├── settings.py
│   ├── urls.py
│   └── wsgi.py
├── static
│   ├── bundle.js
│   └── bundle.js.map
├── stats.json
├── templates
│   ├── index.html
│   ├── run_completion_email_body.txt
│   └── run_completion_email_title.txt
├── webpack.config.js
└── webpack.production.config.js

Javascript

This is run natively on a user’s browser and mainly for website aesthetics and function. Javascript modules are not documented here because it is largely framework dependent and not part of the course.

Powered by React 0.15, written in Javascript ES2015, bundled by Webpack, npm and Babel.

File Structure

server_side/app/
├── components
│   ├── TwoColumnRow.js
│   ├── access.js
│   ├── controls.js
│   ├── loading.js
│   ├── main.js
│   ├── refreshing.js
│   ├── run
│   │   ├── lineplot.js
│   │   ├── plotcontainer.js
│   │   ├── plottoolbar.js
│   │   ├── run.js
│   │   └── simpletooltip.js
│   ├── start.js
│   └── status.js
├── containers
│   ├── allrunscontainer.js
│   ├── calibratecontainer.js
│   ├── defaultcontainer.js
│   └── runcontainer.js
├── index.js
└── utils
    ├── humanize_axes.js
    ├── list_of_colors.js
    ├── round_to_2dp.js
    ├── units.js
    └── validate_email.js