[[!meta  title="slow_bend"]]

In the course of my [[research|Thesis]], I've spend a good deal of
time developing clean, Python interfaces to much of our lab equipment.
I also tend to have strong opinions on the One True Way® to solve a
problem.  This means that I occasionaly end up writing script to run
other people's experiment, especially when they don't take all that
much time to write.

I wrote `slow_bend` for Liming Zhao, who was a postdoc in our lab
from 2008 to 2010.  Liming coated one side of an AFM cantilever with a
film of cellulose and used [[slow_bend.py]] (version 0.2) to monitor
the cantilever deflection as he flushed in different buffers
([paper]).  Unfortunately, the paper claims the data aquisition was
carried out in LabView.

`slow_bend` is not a complicated program; it polls analog input
channels using [[pycomedi]] (and optionally reads temperatures using
backends from [[pypid]]).  The polling continues until `slow_bend`
recieves a [KeyboardInterrupt][].

    $ slow_bend.py --version
    0.4
    $ slow_bend.py 0 3
    #time (second)	chan 0 (bit)	chan 0 (volt)	chan 3 (bit)	chan 3 (volt)
    1.81198e-05	34727	0.598001	39679	2.10925
    4.00409	34956	0.667887	38033	1.60693
    8.00408	35074	0.703899	36780	1.22454
    12.0041	35041	0.693828	35814	0.929732
    16.0041	34917	0.655985	35044	0.694743
    ^C

[paper]: http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/bit.22754
[KeyboardInterrupt]: http://docs.python.org/library/exceptions.html#exceptions.KeyboardInterrupt

[[!tag tags/code]]
[[!tag tags/python]]