NOMAD CAMELS - Your Simple Path to FAIR Experimental Data

What is NOMAD CAMELS?

CAMELS (Configurable Application for Measurements, Experiments and Laboratory Systems) is an open-source measurement software, targeted towards the requirements of experimental physics. Ease of use, rich metadata and FAIR-compliant data are at the heart of CAMELS design.

CAMELS provides a graphical user interface (GUI) that can be used to setup instrument control and measurement protocols. The GUI then generates Python code that interfaces with bluesky to communicate with the instruments and orchestrate the measurement. CAMELS can also be used to communicate with large-scale, distributed systems implemented with EPICS.

Learn more about CAMELS in our peer-reviewed paper

https://joss.theoj.org/papers/10.21105/joss.06371/status.svg

Why CAMELS?

Smooth installation

CAMELS is a Python package distributed via PyPI. It is easily installable on any computer. On Windows, let the installer do all the work for you.

Easy to use

No programming skills required. Just configure your measurement and process protocols. Get it done within minutes.

FAIR data

Automatically store FAIR data with rich metadata that lets you and others understand your experiment in detail. Optionally connect directly with your NOMAD Oasis.

Flexible and extendable

Add further instruments to your setup at will. Reuse and adapt existing measurements quickly.

Scalable

Work with small setups using directly connected instruments. Or connect to large distributed systems using advanced protocols like EPICS.

Community driven

Contribute to CAMELS and add further instruments on GitHub. CAMELS comes with an instrument driver wizard that helps you implement new instruments.

In experimental sciences experiments often utilize a multitude of different measurement devices used in dynamically changing setups. Changing measurement procedures or adding new devices is often cumbersome and difficult as it often requires advanced programming knowledge. CAMELS allows you to define instrument control and measurement protocols using a graphical user interface (GUI) where each measurement step can be added with the click of a button. This provides a low entry-threshold enabling the creation of new and sophisticated measurement protocols without programming knowledge or a deeper understanding of device communication.

Who is CAMELS for?

CAMELS is suited for any researcher not wanting to deal with measurement orchestration and device communication while still having full control and sophisticated data and metadata saving. Implementing new instruments can be done by any one and can be shared with the community. As CAMELS takes care of saving all available metadata, you can share understandable measurement data with colleagues and other researchers with just a few clicks.