Getting started

Welcome to the new users guide to flowchem!

Flowchem is a python library to control a variety of instruments commonly found in chemistry labs.

Installing flowchem

While the RESTful API created by flowchem can be consumed from different programs and programming languages, flowchem itself is written in the popular open-source language Python.

If you already have Python version 3.10 or above, you can install flowchem with pipx as follows:

pip install pipx
pipx ensurepath
pipx install flowchem

This is the recommended way because it will:

  • install flowchem in a virtualenv, without messing up with your system interpreter

  • make the flowchem command available system-wide, by adding it to the system PATH

Alternatively, you can install it normally via pip with:

pip install flowchem

If you don’t have Python yet, you can download it from python.org.

To verify the installation has been completed successfully you can run flowchem --version command.

How to use flowchem

Flowchem needs one device configuration file that specify the connection settings for all the devices to be controlled. To save time, flowchem can autodetect many of the supported device type and generate a configuration stub. This is done by running the flowchem-autodiscover program from the command line.

This is the result of running flowchem-autodiscover on a PC with FIXME WHAT connected to it.

A new file named blabla has been created in the current working directory, with the following content:

Note

While technically my-devices.toml is written in the markup language TOML format, the syntax of this language is intuitive and designed to be as human-editable as possible. If you follow this guide you will not need to learn anything about the TOML syntax but you can just copy and modify the example provided.

As you can see, a few placemarks in the autogenerated file have to be replaced by actual settings. For example, bla

If you have comments or suggestions, please don’t hesitate to reach out!