Documentation

Cycler control, data pipeline, and data visualisation from Empa's robotic battery lab.

• Track samples, experiments and results.
• Control Neware and Biologic cyclers on multiple machines from one place.
• Automatically collect and analyse cycling data.
• Conveniently control cyclers and explore data with a graphical web-app.

Controlling cyclers

aurora-biologic and aurora-neware provide a Python and command-line interface to query, start and stop cyclers, allowing programmatic and remote control.

Experiments can be submitted with a cycler-specific file (e.g. .xml or .mps), or an aurora-unicycler protocol, which is automatically converted to the appropriate format on submission.

Experiments can be defined with C-rates and without sample names - the program will automatically attach sample info and calculate the current required based on the sample information in the database.

Data processing

Data is automatically gathered from cyclers, all incoming files are converted to one open standard - accepts Biologic .mpr, Neware .ndax, Neware .xlsx. Incoming data is converted to fast, open, and space-efficient parquet format.

Data is converted using fastnda and yadg, processing the raw binary data directly. This is much faster and more space efficient than exporting to text or Excel formats from these cyclers.

Time-series data is automatically analysed to extract per-cycle and summary data.

Visualisation

A web-app based on Plotly Dash allows rapid, interactive viewing of time-series and per-cycle data, as well as the ability to control experiments on cyclers through the graphical interface.

Quickstart

Install with Python>=3.10:

pip install aurora-cycler-manager

Update an existing installation:

pip install aurora-cycler-manager --upgrade

Connect to an existing project:

aurora-setup connect "path/to/your/project"

Create a new project:

aurora-setup init "path/to/your/project"

You must then fill out the configuration file.

Start the app:

aurora-app

Start the daemon:

aurora-daemon

You interact with cyclers, you need password-less SSH access to the cycler PCs. To control cyclers, aurora-biologic or aurora-neware needs to be installed on the cycler PC.

Read the documentation for more detail.

Acknowledgements

This software was developed at the Laboratory of Materials for Energy Conversion at Empa, the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, and supported by funding from the IntelLiGent project from the European Union’s research and innovation program under grant agreement No. 101069765, and from the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research, and Innovation (SERI) under contract No. 22.001422.