Vici Valco Valves

Introduction

While different valve heads can be mounted on the same Vici Universal actuator, so far only injection valves are supported, as they are the most common type. Support for additional valve types can be trivially added, based on the example of Knauer Valves.

As for all flowchem devices, the virtual instrument can be instantiated via a configuration file that generates an openAPI endpoint.

Connection

Depending on the device options, Vici valves can be controlled in different ways. The code here reported assumes serial communication, but can be easily ported to different connection type if necessary.

Configuration

Configuration sample showing all possible parameters:

[device.my-vici-valve]  # This is the valve identifier
type = "ViciValve"
port = "COM11"  # This will be /dev/tty* under linux/MacOS
address = 0  # Only needed for daisy-chaining. The address can be set on the pump, see manufacturer manual.

Note

Serial connection parameters Note, further parameters for the serial connections (i.e. those accepted by serial.Serial) such as baudrate, parity, stopbits and bytesize can be specified. However, it should not be necessary as the default for the instrument are automatically used.

API methods

See the device API reference for a description of the available methods.

Valve positions

The valve position naming follow the general convention of flowchem:

Injection valves have position named ‘load’ and ‘inject’
Distribution valves have positions from ‘1’ to ‘n’ where n is the total amount of port available.

Device detection

Knauer Valves can be auto-detected via the flowchem-autodiscover command-line utility. After having installed flowchem, run flowchem-autodiscover to create a configuration stub with all the devices that can be auto-detected on your PC.

Note

Valve types Note that the actual type of valve cannot be detected automatically, so you will need to replace the generic KnauerValve type in the configuration with one of the valid device types (i.e. one of Knauer6Port2PositionValve, Knauer6Port6PositionValve, Knauer12PortValve and Knauer16PortValve)

Further information

For further information please refer to the manufacturer manual