NOMAD

NOMAD CAMELS
Control instruments, run measurement protocols, and record FAIR data!

NOMAD CAMELS lets you turn your research ideas into measurement and process protocols in minutes. Implement instrument communication without programming skills, increase productivity and flexibility, and produce FAIR data.

Features

What is NOMAD CAMELS?

NOMAD CAMELS (short: CAMELS) is a standalone 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 is suited for any researcher wanting full control and full documentation of experiments without the need of programming skills.

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.

Use cases

Why use NOMAD CAMELS?

CAMELS allows you to define measurement protocols and instrument control using a graphical user interface with just a few mouse clicks while you don't need to care about device communication – CAMELS does.

Graphical user interface

You define your measurement and process protocols with a few clicks.

Easily add and remove instruments
Design your measurement and process protocols
Run experiments
Automatically get comprehensive documentation of your experiment

Instrument control

Let CAMELS take care of instrument communication.

Community-developed instrument drivers
Local communication via any interface
Connect to your existing distributed instrument infrastructure via EPICS
Build your own instrument drivers using built-in assistants

FAIR data

Let CAMELS automatically store all available data and metadata.

Measurement data and timestamps
Instruments and settings
Human-readable summary
Python code which runs the measurement protocol

How to run NOMAD CAMELS

CAMELS is distributed via PyPI and can run on any computer that supports Python. There is a special installer for Windows. See our installation guide in the documentation.

1. CAMELS Software

CAMELS requires a desktop computer running Windows, Linux/UNIX or macOS. The required Python environment is installed either through the installer (on Windows) or manually ( installation guide).

2. Drivers

Once installed, CAMELS lets you install instrument drivers from PyPi via the graphical user interface. You can also create and run local self-developed instrument drivers.

Developed at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg with FAIR data practices and open-source approach in mind.

NOMAD CAMELS is open source

CAMELS is an open-source project. We are happy for feedback, suggestions, discussions, and for contributions to further developments of CAMELS’ graphical user interface and instrument drivers.

GNU LGPL 2.1

We use a permissive license so that you can use CAMELS everywhere and for all purposes.

Discuss

Openly discuss issues and opportunities and help shape future CAMELS development on GitHub.

Contribute

Develop and share new instrument drivers or contribute bugfixes, features and extensions via standard open-source workflows on Github.