Introduction

Welcome to the MUSCLE developer manual. This manual shall help you to get started with the MUSCLE application.

MUSCLE stands for Muscle Unified System for Controlling Laboratory Equipment.

It aims to provide a simple yet powerful environment to control and monitor nearly any equipment via a single centralized interface. Initially it started as an application to monitor laboratory devices, which is why laboratory comes with its name.

The application includes the webapp, backend and a skeleton for a device which is used to control and monitor the equipment. All of those parts are implemented and tested on Linux.

More information about the concept of MUSCLE can be found at muscle.ti.bfh.ch.

Parts of this Application

Application

The core of MUSCLE is the application over which the devices can be controlled and monitored. This part is mostly implemented by us. It itself consists of two parts, the webapp and the backend REST API.

Devices

Devices need to be implemented by you using the skeleton we provide. This skeleton is again an independent server which you must supplement with the communication to control the equipment. Since you are responsible to implement them, there is no limit in what equipment you want to control. As long as there is some sort of an interface the device can talk to.

Target Audience

This documentation is meant for anyone which wants to install MUSCLE as well as for developers who want to implement the devices.

Some knowledge about installing servers and programming with python are recommended.

What You Will Need

First of all, you will need a server to serve the webapp and the backend.

Then you will need some (embedded) Linux computers or boards, like Raspberry for example, to install and serve the device server. Those must then be implemented to communicate with your equipment. Make sure the computers or boards you choose provide the necessary interfaces to talk to the equipment.