At Protein Simple we have developed a line of scientific instruments controlled via a web browser whose software is written in Python. Traditionally instrument control has been done with a desktop application. We moved recently to web browser base instrument control and analysis which brought with it some novel, at least to us, issues.

There number of issues that arose in using a web server framework, in our case Django, which usually present data from a database to control hardware. These include large latency, unexpected hardware errors, and uncertainty in the state of the hardware. We developed a architecture that allows the Django server to run unaltered and largely separated from direct control and knowledge of the hardware. Our design takes into account Python's limited multi-threading and priority.