Quick Start Guide#

This quick start guide will help you get up and running with AFL-automation quickly.

Creating Your First Driver#

AFL-automation is built around the concept of drivers - Python classes that interact with hardware or provide services. Here’s a simple example:

from AFL.automation.APIServer.Driver import Driver

class SimpleDriver(Driver):
    defaults = {}
    defaults['greeting'] = 'Hello, World!'

    def __init__(self, overrides=None):
        Driver.__init__(self, name='SimpleDriver',
                       defaults=self.gather_defaults(),
                       overrides=overrides)

    def say_hello(self):
        """Say a greeting based on configuration"""
        return self.config['greeting']

Running as a Microservice#

Once you have a driver, you can turn it into a web service:

from AFL.automation.APIServer.APIServer import APIServer

# Create the driver instance
my_driver = SimpleDriver()

# Create the server
server = APIServer('my-service')

# Add your driver and run the server
server.create_queue(my_driver)
server.run(host='0.0.0.0', port=5000)

We usually run the server using a short-hand module called AFL.automation.shared.launcher. This requires two lines of boilerplate code at the end of your driver, like so. It also requires the module (i.e, the Python file your driver is in) to be named the same as the Driver name.

from AFL.automation.APIServer.Driver import Driver

class SimpleDriver(Driver):
    defaults = {}
    defaults['greeting'] = 'Hello, World!'

    def __init__(self, overrides=None):
        Driver.__init__(self, name='SimpleDriver',
                       defaults=self.gather_defaults(),
                       overrides=overrides)

    def say_hello(self):
        """Say a greeting based on configuration"""
        return self.config['greeting']

if __name__ == '__main__':
    from AFL.automation.shared.launcher import *
Once you have these magic lines in your Driver, you can simply invoke the server as a Python module from the command line:

or for a built-in driver, for instance SeabreezeUVVis:

Accessing the Service (API)#

You can now access your service via HTTP requests or use the built-in client:

from AFL.automation.APIServer.Client import Client

# Connect to the service
client = Client('http://localhost:5000')

# Call a method
response = client.enqueue(task_name='say_hello',interactive=True)
print(response)  # Outputs: 'Hello, World!'

# Call a method asynchronously
response = client.enqueue(task_name='say_hello',interactive=False)
print(response)  # Outputs a uuid

# Get the result of the task
result = client.get_result(response)
print(result)  # Outputs: 'Hello, World!'

Accessing the Service (Browser)#

You also get a browser-based user interface, accessible by simply pointing a browser to http://localhost:5000

Using this interface, you can view the driver status, call methods that are labeled as quickbar methods, pause/unpause the queue, and set configuration items.

Next Steps#

For more detailed instructions, check out: