The smartLab: Experimental and environmental control and monitoring of the chemistry laboratory

A suite of software applications was developed in order to provide functionality to monitor and record environmental and experimental data and the associated metadata. A piece of software developed by IBM called the Microbroker was used as middleware to handle the flow of messages containing the monitored data using the MQ telemetry transport (MQTT) format. Methods to send control commands were also employed where allowed by the experimental set up. The software was used to monitor a range of laboratories within the School of Chemistry at the University of Southampton. A number of repository solutions were implemented to build an understanding of what is required for a scalable and interoperable system.