So considering the great Water challenges, at present and for the future, we seek new open ways, to increase the productivity of laboratories involved in activities related to water resources.
We therefore propose the project: Open Automation for Water using Free Software and Free Hardware.
We intend to avoid unnecessary complexity and use the KISS philosophy (Keep it Simple Stupid) to develop:
Simple Solutions to Simple Problems.
Nowadays the Automation of analytical methods (especially methods of flow analysis) or the control of bench experiments does not necessarily imply large investments in equipment and development of complex programs.
In Lab Automation we must consider that many equipments and instruments (peristaltic pumps, multiport valves, spectrophotometers, potentiometer, balance/scales, among others) comes from the factory with resources for serial communication (RS232) with a PC.
But very often they are used without taking advantage of the resources available for remote control or data acquisition!
To control the Hardware we need Software. And the software can be developed without requiring deep knowledge of programming using Tcl/Tk, a very powerful but easy to learn dynamic programming language.
Tcl is a very useful scripting language that runs on Linux and Windows, and Tk is a graphic library that provides Widgets to develp Graphical User Interfaces (GUI).
Tcl/Tk was developed within the philosophy of Open Source, with large amount of documentation available on Internet.