Hi to all of the members in the Eclipse iot working group.
My name is Joel Koenka, a 3rd year PhD in the group of Prof. Peter Hauser
In our group, we build Analytical Chemistry instruments ourselves, and try to improve them with new ideas.
In
the past few years, we've started using Arduino for controlling our
various instruments, and I realized the need for a GUI framework for
scientific instruments.
Currently, this market is controlled by LabView (National Instruments).
This is a very powerful software, but also very expensive. On top of that, many people find it hard to use, and specifically in our research group it led to frustration.
So
being an experienced programmer, I set out to build a GUI framework for
scientific instruments, that lets system developers to have powerful
custom user interfaces for their systems, while requiring the minimal
programming effort from them. This is key, as most system builders (at
least in academia) have little or no programming experience.
I called it Instrumentino
to imply it's meant to control Arduino based instruments, but I wrote
it in a more general way, so other microcontrollers can be used instead
(such as RaspberryPi, RedPitaya, etc.).
Attached to this email are two article (one already published and the second to be published soon) about Instrumentino.
The reason I'm writing to you, is that I want to keep developing Instrumentino,
making it the open-source alternative to LabView, and to enable
instrument developers have good and effective GUI programs to control
their experiments.
To do this, I need some help. I've been developing Instrumentino alone for quite some time, and being a busy PhD student, I realize I need help.
I've sent a very similar message to the Science working group, but I think also fits to the scope of the iot group, being a machine-machine communication program.
I hope to find other open-hardware enthusiasts to join me in perfecting Instrumentio.
Also, I hope to be able to integrate code pieces from other projects, adding capabilities to the system.
So I propose this as a project in the iot working group. Is anyone interested?
Thanks and good day,
Joel
