Virtual Lab solution
During the time of Covid-19, the world went into a lockdown, with universities shut, it was difficult for everyone. It’s been more than 6 months that universities have been shut, making it very challenging for students and teachers to progress in courses requiring practical hand skills. For a newly admitted undergraduate student it’s very important to explore various domains of his field. That includes practical courses such as chemistry laboratory as well. Any Laboratory course is exciting as we get to apply what we have learned through various experiments. Our project of creating Virtual laboratory is an attempt to provide a platform where we can simulate laboratory hands-on experience virtually. Our aim is to create and provide an environment to extend, improve, integrate, refine, and assist the experimentation process in chemistry laboratory.
After a lot of investigation and analysis of system needs, we have used python based PyQt5 library for developing a CSS based desktop software. At present we have worked on 4 experiments :
- The copper estimation by iodometry.
- Kinetics of Iodination of Acetone.
- Calculation of Equilibrium Constant.
- Calculation of dissociation constant by conductometry.
The same methodology can be extended for simulation of other experiments. For a demo video of how to navigate through the GUI, watch :
For this project we have used PyQt5 to create the GUI application. As compared to Tkinter, PyQt5 has more tools to build large GUI applications. PyQt5 is under general public license (GPLv3) and thus complete source code for the GUI developed can be referred for any modification from our GitHub repository. (Python Community, for Python Community, 2019). PyQt5 is a comprehensive set of Python bindings for Qt v5. It is implemented as more than 35 extension modules and enables Python to be used as an alternative application development language to C++ on all supported platforms including iOS and Android. PyQt5 may also be embedded in C++ based applications to allow users of those applications to configure or enhance the functionality of those applications. (Python Community, for Python Community, 2019)