Funahashi Lab.

Latest release: 1.0.0, released 20th Jan 2015

Overview

ValveConfigurator is a configuration tool for controlling solenoid valves attached to microfluidics device through Elexol USB I/O 24 R Module. By using this software, user can design opening / closing patterns of solenoid valves on each time point. The solenoid valves which are directly controlled by this software will contoll the streams in the cell culturing device by opening and closing in each solenoid valve. The integration of these techniques allows automated control of multiple different cell culture conditions. The software should build and work without serious troubles on MacOSX (confirmed to work on Mavericks (10.9.x).

Download

ValveConfigurator is distributed under the terms of LGPL.

• Binary file and source code (in zipped format) ValveConfigurator-1.0.0.zip

Dependencies

ValveConfigurator requires Java to be installed on your system. If you have not yet installed Java runtime on your MacOSX, please follow the instruction on Java for OS X 2014-001 to install Java 6 provided by Apple, or Java SE Downloads to install Java 8 provided by Oracle. ValveConfigurator is compiled on Java 6, so you can run on both Java 6 and 8 environment.

To actually controll solenoid valves with your specified opening / closing patterns, you have to download and install Xcode from Apple to get the LLVM compiler installed on your MacOSX.

Installation

ValveConfigurator is written in Java, and it is distributed as a pre-compiled binary. To install ValveConfigurator, just double-click ValveConfigurator-1.0.0.zip and move extracted folder (ValveConfigurator-1.0.0) to your working directory.

Usage

Dobule-clicking ValveConfigurator.jar will launch the ValveConfigurator. From the user-interface, users can directly specify "when" and "which" valve should be opened / closed by following procedure.

1. Set the initial state (opened or closed) of each valve through a radiobutton under "valve initial state".



2. After setting the initial state of each valves, type in a time point "when" the state of a valve should be reversed in a text field under "valve reversing pattern". For example, if a valve 1 on port A is set as "ON" for a initial state, and then a value "2" is written in the "valve reversing pattern", the state of the valve will be reverted (set as "OFF") on time point 2 (unit is in seconds).



3. Pressing [Visualize] button will show the timing chart of valves. You can open multiple timing charts and select which behavior of the valves should be observed on each dialog.



4. By adding new lines in procedure 2, you can add more reversing patterns. For example, if you add "4" and "6" after "2" for valve 1, the state will be reverted on time point 2, 4 and 6 respectively.



5. Click [Finish] button once you have finished creating opening / closing patterns. The patterns will be save as a code of C programing language in the following location.

6. To actually control the behavior of solenoid valves, open a terminal (Terminal.app) and go to the folder where the code is stored and then type "make".

cd /Users/funa/Downloads/ValveConfigurator-1.0.0/myControlProg
make

7. The output of "make" command will be displayed as follows:

gcc -Wall -c myControlProg.c
gcc -o myControlProg libftd2xx.a libvalvecontroller.a myControlProg.o -lobjc -Wl,-framework -Wl,IOKit -Wl,-framework -Wl,CoreFoundation -Wl,-prebind

8. After a successful compilation of code, an executable file "myControlProg" will be generated in the same folder.

9. Plug "Elexol USB I/O 24 R Module" into your Mac and execute following command to actually start the control of solenoid valves.

./myControlProg

10. An output will be as follows:

    Serial: ELSBY5LB
    FT_OpenEx: Success - ELSBY5LB is open
    Purging receive/transmit buffers...
    FT_Write OK 1 bytes
    FT_Read OK: [USB I/O 24] (10 bytes)
    FT_Write OK 9 bytes
    FT_Write OK 2 bytes
    FT_Write OK 2 bytes
    FT_Write OK 2 bytes
    Valve initial state of PortA:00000001
    Valve initial state of PortB:00000000
    Valve initial state of PortC:00000000
    start controlling!
    start multi processing!
    FT_Write OK 2 bytes
    Valve 1 of PortA reversed at 2.000000. valve state is 00000000.
    FT_Write OK 2 bytes
    Valve 1 of PortA reversed at 4.000000. valve state is 00000001.
    FT_Write OK 2 bytes
    Valve 1 of PortA reversed at 6.000000. valve state is 00000000.
    finish multi processing!
    finish controlling!
    FT_Write OK 2 bytes
    FT_Write OK 2 bytes
    FT_Write OK 2 bytes
    Purging receive/transmit buffers...
    Closed device ELSBY5LB
    

    where the log "Valve 1 of PortA reversed at ..." represents that myControlProg changed the state of valves at your specified time point.

Trouble shooting

If you have encountered an error while executing myControlProg as follows,

./myControlProg
Serial: ELSBY5LB
Error: FT_OpenEx with ELSBY5LB failed

it might be caused by a conflict with VCP(Virtual Communication Port) driver and D2XX Driver(libftd2xx). This problem occurs when you are using MacOSX Mavericks (10.9.x) or higher, because it includes VCP driver by default, which is not welcomed by libftd2xx users ;-)
To avoid this problem, please execute the following command:

sudo kextunload -b com.apple.driver.AppleUSBFTDI
Password: ******** (your password)

Which will unload VCP driver from your Mac. Please notice that the VCP driver will be loaded again once you have restarted your Mac. That means, whenever you restart (reboot) your Mac, you have to type the above command. There is another solution to unload VCP driver forever. If you are interested in the other solution, please refer to this document (section 7.1 "Using VCP or D2XX with OSX 10.9") provided by FTDI.

Authors

ValveConfigurator has been primary developed by

• Hiromu Takizawa
• Akira Funahashi

with substantial contributions from

• Takumi Hiraiwa
• Noriko Hiroi

Contact

If you have any questions / comments, please send an email to
ValveController development team: <info_at_fun.bio.keio.ac.jp> (please replace _at_ with @)
We appreciate your feedback!