TA Instruments DSC & TGA
In this guideline the steps required to integrate a TA Instruments DSC & TGA instruments into the Chemotion ELN. This procedure enables remote access to the device's computer, which runs the vendor's software, and the procedure to transfer experiment data to the Chemotion ELN’s inbox.
General preparation aspects can be found here.
Considering all these aspects, this procedure has been conducted on the following system configurations. However, it is likely to work on systems with different software versions as well.
Specifications of the TA Instruments' PC
- Operating system: Windows 10
- Software Name: TA Instruments TRIOS v.5.7
- Connected to Internet/Intranet: Yes
- Data files generated: .tri
- Conversion: manual conversion to .csv, .xls, .xml (+others)
- Static IP address has been configured
Objectives
- Remote Device Control
- Data transfer to Chemotion ELN inbox
For the DSC device integration, we have decided to configure both these features.
Configurations
Remote Device Control
General guideline regarding the configurations of remote device control can be found here.
Data transfer
Data will automatically be transferred to the Chemotion ELN once the data has been saved locally on the computer. The user only needs to make sure to name the output file according to the naming convention before saving it to the local machine.
NOTE: Experiment data can be manually converted in the TRIOS software from .tri to .csv, .xls, .xml, (+others) file formats. If the converted files are saved to the same location the .tri files were saved to, and monitored by the EFW executable (see below), then converted files will also be automatically transferred to the Chemotion ELN's Inbox.
Please take care that you communicate name conventions to all users of the Chemotion ELN.
Configurations in device's PC
The device's PC and the Chemotion ELN both need access to a common network storage location. This can be set up on a third-party storage (a NAS server, shared storage of another PC etc.) or it can be set up locally on the device's PC. In this case, the LSDF storage service from KIT has been used.
We need to download an executable file from the EFW builder that will run on the computer to transfer data from a predefined source (local location on the computer) to a destination (LSDF server in this case) and schedule a task at startup so that the process keeps running on the computer. Details can be found here.
The PC needs to be restarted. After restart check in the task manager that the EFW executable was successfully started and is running.
Configurations in Chemotion ELN
The Chemotion ELN’s data collector has to be configured to collect the data from the network location where the device PC's EFW program transferred it to.
As for the file collector mechanism, there are two options.
- Collecting attachment files from emails
- Collecting file or folder from local drives or over SCP
Here in this guide the files are collected from remote storage locations and are distributed to specific users based on the file-name matching the name abbreviation of the user.