Context
This was my undergraduate thesis project.
It took place shortly after returning to in-person classes post-COVID. As a response to the pandemic, the university started investing in projects that promoted more flexible learning environments. One of those initiatives was called Laboratorios Digitales (Digital Labs). Its goal was to make some of the university’s physical labs accessible remotely — basically, to digitize them.
My project focused on researching the state of the university’s existing labs, evaluating how hard it would be to digitize them, and then building a pilot to digitize one. The pilot I ended up creating was for an optical experiments machine used by mid-program physics students (Phywe XR 4.0 expert unit, 35 kV).
Use of technologies
The way I managed to digitize the lab was by using AutoIt scripts that interacted with the machine’s graphical interface (which was the best option given how old and inflexible the software was). A backend built with FastAPI (Python) handled requests with instructions for the machine. It would update the AutoIt scripts accordingly, run them, and return the results. On the frontend side, I used Svelte (JavaScript) to let users input available instructions and watch the machine live as it ran the experiment.
The publication link is here: http://hdl.handle.net/1992/59327