Release 1.11 now available for download

Remote control of laboratory instruments and other experiment equipment can open the door to running fascinating and potentially complex experiments that would be too time consuming and error prone if conducted entirely manually. However until now options for doing this have been limited to spending big bucks on highly sophisticated proprietary software with all sorts of advanced math and graphics capabilities, needing significant programming skills, or falling back on terminal applications or simple utilities supplied by individual instrument vendors that can only control one instrument at a time. And even the expensive software is unlikely to be able to automate instruments you designed and built yourself unless you have the skills to write often complex operating system-dependent drivers for them.

Skippity breaks this mould. It’s free software that can communicate with multiple instruments at once, pretty much regardless of their command sets – even instruments you’ve designed and built yourself. It’s written in Java, and will run on almost anything that supports physical or USB virtual serial ports and Ethernet.