For external control of the BioPro software and the flexible handling of the Omega-Machine we have developed a TCPComm package using the interpreted environment provided by Mathematica. It communicates via Mathlink with a directly executable program written in C to use Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) as a communication layer. This in turn communicates across the network via TCP with the external command interface for the Ng-biopro software (leading author Uwe Tangen, RUB-BioMIP) running on the experimental machine that is connected via the Bio@Fox stand alone interface computer with the Omega machine.
Furthermore, it contains two palettes (upper left image) created by the commands NGPalette[] and MAPalette[] to get user friendly assisted input of the key interface as well as the custom Mathematica commands. The features of the TCPComm package (ver 1.2.6) written by J.S.McCaskill are documented here.
TCP Communication with BioPro Software
An example file for taking complex programmed control of the Omega Machine can be downloaded.
Users can write their own command sequences (macros) and execute these in a timed interpretative environment using this software. This simple example collects data from various subimages, plotting results interactively and controlling the laser illumination synchronized with microscope images.
Furthermore, the measurements regarding microfluidic integration of spatially confined replication was done using the TCPComm package.