openreactor

Supervise benchtop lab reactors from a Raspberry Pi: temperature, mixing, dosing and water chemistry, with recorded runs.

Overview

openreactor runs batch and semi-batch reactors on the bench, for biology, wet chemistry and thermal work such as melting and curing. It reads sensors and drives heaters, motors and pumps over I2C from a Raspberry Pi, and records each run.

In 2.0, the heater and motor boards run their own control loops and stop their outputs if they lose contact with the Pi. openreactor supervises them: it applies setpoints and profiles, reads water-chemistry sensors, records each run, and stops every output on request.

Status

2.0 is being rewritten on main and is not usable yet. Progress is tracked in #17.

For a working install, use 1.x: the latest release is v1.2.1, and the 1.x branch has its setup and usage instructions.

Development

Needs uv and just.

git clone https://github.com/uwo-fast/openreactor.git
cd openreactor
just setup   # create the environment
just check   # format check, lint, type-check
just test    # run the tests

To validate a configuration file, run just run check-config examples/openreactor.toml. The example lists every setting with a comment. just --list shows the other recipes. Optionally, install the pre-commit hooks with pre-commit install.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome. See the organization contribution guide.

Citation

If you use openreactor in your work, please cite it. Use the Cite this repository button on GitHub, or see CITATION.cff.

Acknowledgements

openreactor was originally written by Etienne Michels, Wilson J. Holmes and Finn Hafting in the MOST Research Group.

Icons from Feather; open source logo from Remix Icon.

License

Copyright © 2021–2026 the openreactor contributors.

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. See LICENSE.

It was first released in 2021 under GPL-2.0-only by the MOST Research Group. In January 2025 the FAST Research Group reworked it and relicensed it under the AGPL-3.0, so that improvements stay available to everyone who uses it.

Contact

Maintained by the FAST research group. For research collaboration inquiries, contact Dr. Joshua Pearce (joshua.pearce@uwo.ca).