Software external interface and specification

Operating the Omega Machine is a complex undertaking. Even with the help of a user-friendly graphical user-interface (GUI) many tasks remain to be done which cannot be delegated to such a GUI. 


For example the optimization runs, described in the design-of-experiments section required an external interface to connect the optimizer and the pipetting robot with the BioPro-software. This also holds for the connection to the integrated software environment Mathematica and all its extensive analytical methods. The solution taken to tackle this problem was to define an external interface which is based on a TCP-socket connection between the BioPro-software and any other custom-written software. As a starting point test-interface-software is also provided which can be used as a template to evaluate own developed interface-software.


Essentially the communication is realized via structured ASCII-strings. The first character specifies the command to be executed or the type of answer to be received and the further characters or items specify parameters. If a parameter is constituted of several entities then the number of these entities is prepended to this list of entities. Everything else can be read in the specification of the external interface.


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