OriginLab-MCP

An MCP server for OriginLab Origin. It reads and writes worksheets, builds and styles multi-panel graphs, and exports figures — and it is careful about the difference between what Origin accepted and what Origin did.

1.0.0. Every tool here has been run against a real Origin 2024, the Origin App installs and starts the bridge, and examples/five_panel_figure.py builds a five-panel figure end to end.

Known gaps, so they are not a surprise: a legend placed in a corner is checked for being inside its panel, not for sitting on top of the data; a log axis gets no minor ticks unless you ask; and the 213-entry option table records what Origin documents, not what each option was measured to do — sixteen of them have been watched change a picture.

Requirements

• Origin or OriginPro 2021b or newer (embedded Python 3.9+)
• Python 3.10+ for the server
• Windows, either natively or in a VM

Install

pip install originlab-mcp
originlab-mcp --build-app .

That prints the three steps Origin needs, which are worth stating here because the obvious one does nothing: dragging the folder onto the Apps gallery is accepted in silence and adds no button. Copy the generated OriginLab MCP Bridge folder into %LOCALAPPDATA%\OriginLab\Apps, pack it from Origin's Command Window with

mkOPX app:="OriginLab MCP Bridge" opx:="C:\path\to\OriginLab MCP Bridge.opx";

— backslashes, because forward slashes hang mkOPX — and drag the resulting .opx into Origin. A button appears; clicking it brings the Script Window forward, where the bridge reports starting, loaded, serving.

Point your MCP client at originlab-mcp.

originlab-mcp --status says whether a bridge is listening, and exits non-zero when one is not. originlab-mcp --stop ends it.

Stopping is a command rather than a second button because a button must not do the work itself: while the bridge serves it holds Origin's UI thread, so anything the button ran would run from inside the message pump. A button that only spawns an external process is possible -- that is how the upstream project does it -- but the instruction still has to reach the bridge over the socket, and --stop is that instruction without the indirection.

What's different

Origin accepts a great deal that it then ignores, without ever saying so.

• set <plot> -zzzz 9 — an option Origin has never heard of — returns true, reads back as 9.0, and leaves the graph pixel-for-pixel identical.
• plot:=2003 is not a plot type. Origin makes the window, draws the axes, writes the legend, and plots nothing.
• A style written to a plot inside a group reads back exactly as requested, while Origin goes on drawing the group's style.

None of these is catchable from the reply, so the checking happens before the write and after the figure:

Before. Options are checked against Origin's own documented list, and an invented one is refused with the options it was probably meant to be. This matters because the real names are unguessable — line width is -w, bar fill pattern is -pfp — so a plausible guess is the likely failure, not a typo. Writing to a grouped plot member is refused outright. Plot types come from oPlotIDs.h in the Origin installation rather than from documentation, and every name in the table was drawn and looked at.

After. A per-call check cannot reach the question that matters, which is whether the figure is right. So the operations that build one report the thing that could contradict them:

That list exists because of a measured failure: a five-panel figure where all twenty-three steps returned OK and the result was unusable. One legend had been placed at left = 24953 on a page 6432 wide — legend.x is in data coordinates, not the percentages it was being given — and Origin's export grew the canvas to contain it, squeezing the figure into a corner. Nothing in any reply said anything was wrong.

A read-back is reported as a read-back, never as proof:

{
  "requested": 60,
  "readback": {"readable": true, "value": 60.0, "matches_request": true},
  "readback_means": "Origin stored this value where 'get' can find it. It is not
                     proof that the graph changed: Origin also stores options it
                     does not recognise."
}

Exporting the graph is the only thing that settles it, which is why origin_graph_export is a first-class tool rather than a way to save pictures.

Arguments this server does not read are refused, with the nearest name it does. The same failure it guards against in Origin turned up here first: worksheet_read takes max_rows, and a call passing rows=3 used to get every row in the sheet and no indication its argument had been dropped.

The tool surface is small on purpose. One plot tool with a plot_type parameter rather than one per chart type; one plot_option_get/set pair rather than a wrapper per property.

Tools

examples/five_panel_figure.py builds a five-panel figure end to end and prints, at every step, the number that could contradict it.

Setups

Windows, everything local — the usual case. Server and Origin on the same machine, talking over loopback TCP.

Origin in a Windows VM, working from macOS or Linux — also supported. The server runs inside the VM over ssh; only the MCP client is on the host. This works because the server reaches Origin through a loopback socket rather than COM, which cannot cross a Windows session boundary.

MCP client  ──ssh──▶  server (Windows)  ──TCP 127.0.0.1──▶  Origin

docs/remote-origin.md walks through that one: the ssh server, the key (Windows puts an administrator's in a different file and ignores the usual one without saying so), and pointing an MCP client at it.

Notes on Origin's behaviour

Things measured here that no documentation mentions:

• originpro is single-threaded, absolutely. Called from any thread but Origin's UI thread it blocks while holding the GIL and deadlocks the whole embedded interpreter. Origin's window stays responsive; its Python is gone. The bridge therefore serves on that thread and pumps Origin's message queue between requests.
• A modal dialog stops the bridge, because the dialog holds the thread the bridge serves on — while the handshake file goes on saying it is up. Exporting into a directory that does not exist opens one, so that is checked before the export is sent.
• A legend has two pairs of coordinates in different spaces. legend.x/legend.y are the layer's data coordinates; legend.left/.top are page units, the same ones page.width reports.
• plotxy ogl:=<new> makes a new layer, not a new page, and does not make it active. [<new>] is the new page.
• Origin exchanges the axes for bar charts and reports it through no layer property. It moves the title objects to match and keeps their rotation, so the value-axis title ends up under the frame reading bottom to top.
• -w is points × 500; -wp takes points. Passing a point value to -w gives a hairline rather than an error.
• A fill pattern set with -pfp alone is invisible: Origin draws it in the fill colour, so -pfc is needed too, and neither changes anything on its own.
• LabTalk stops at the first statement it rejects, so a script that reports failure has run an unknown prefix of itself.
• Origin refuses to start Python while a command is in flight, and every bridge request is one. Scripts containing run -pyf or py.exec are refused up front rather than failing without explanation.

References

• Ge-Shun/origin-mcp — the embedded-bridge transport approach this project's architecture follows.
• garethbeaumo/originlab-mcp — a COM-attached server; simpler to run when Origin is on the same desktop session.
• Origin LabTalk reference · originpro

Origin and OriginPro are products of OriginLab Corporation. This project is not affiliated with OriginLab.

Licence

MIT.