For my experiments with zebrafish, I typically generate dynamic odor landscapes for the fish / fish brain explant by varying the speed of the wheels of an Ismatec peristaltic pump, thereby changing the concentration of the applied stimuli over time. Recently, I bought one of their digital pumps (Reglo ICC with four independent channels), but the company only provides a Labview code sample for custom implementation.

I wrote a small Matlab adapter class to interface with the pump. In order to spare other people from this effort, here is my implementation on Github. It allows to change pump speed, pumping direction etc by a serial protocol that is transmitted via USB and a virtual COM port. – It should be easy to use this as a starting point for a similar code snippet in Python.

Clearly, this will be useful for only a small number of people, but I at least would have been glad to find a sample code in the internet that could have spared me the time to write the code by myself. Hopefully Google will find its way to direct people in need to these links. Here are some guiding tags: Reglo ICC, Ismatec, Cole-Parmer, serial port, USB, COM, serial object, adapter class, object-oriented Matlab.