Ampletracks

A free and open-source sample tracking web app

Stavrina Dimosthenous

Henry Royce Institute

2024-10-22

Overview

• Need
• Ampletracks
• References

Need

Organisation

• I want to keep my samples organised
• I want to keep track of my samples
• I want to keep track of what I have done to my samples
• I want to keep track of what my samples have produced

What usually happens

Picture of samples in a bag; courtesy of the author

Picture of a sample mounted with a labelled plastic sample bag, label is redacted; courtesy of the author

Picture of a desk with unlabelled samples; courtesy of the author

Solutions?

Spreadsheet animation by M. W. Toews is licensed under CC BY 4.0.

Picture of a desk with a compartmentalised sample box

What about Ampletracks?

Ampletracks

Our sponsors

Ampletracks - philosophy

• Perfect

• Good
• Flexible and usable
• Metadata field management and configuration
• Record creation and editing
• Free, open-source and shared

Ampletracks - philosophy

The Ampletracks GitHub repository

Sample Tracking

Sample Tracking

• Web front-end to a configurable database
• Built specifically for sample tracking
  • Inheritance
  • Relationships

Sample Tracking

• Works with you to physically and digitally track samples
• QR code label function to associate physical samples with records
• Record parent - child relationships (intrinsic)
• Record to Record semantic relationships between different record types (extrinsic)
• Graph view relationship visualisation
  • Switch from intrinsic to extrinsic relationships

Sample Tracking

Sample Tracking

• 14 data field types (and expanding) for modular and customisable Record types

• Including

  • Chemical formulae with built-in alloy at.% to wt.% converter

• Fully mobile web-browser usable

  Some users prefer this!

Sample Tracking

QR label printing

• Choose a label size
  • Current support:
    • Avery Ultra Resistant Labels B7651 (65 labels per sheet)
    • Avery Resistant Labels L6011 (27 labels per sheet)

Sample Tracking

QR label printing

• Print QR codes for records individually
• Print multiple QR codes at once
• Assign reserved QR codes to pre-existing records on scanning QR code
• Create a record by scanning a QR code

Sample Tracking

Sample Tracking

Permissions and management

• Each user can be assigned one or more roles
• Each role is a bundle of permissions
• Each permission says for a given entity:
  • what is allowed: create, read, update or delete
  • how wide ranging the permission is: own, project, global
• To facilitate per-project level permissions each record is assigned to a single project and each user is assigned to one or more projects

Sample Tracking

Ampletracks under the hood

• Context agnostic front-end relational database
  • Record type ≍ Table
  • Form data field ≍ column

Try Ampletracks

https://demo.ampletracks.com/iod//

How to get Ampletracks

1. On your infrastucture (on-premise/cloud)
   • Need a virtual machine/server with Linux
   • Need some IT support
   • Might be able to save files directly
2. Via the instance on Royce infrastucture
   • Already set-up and running
   • Might need a private area depending on the work
   • On University of Manchester infrastructure
   • Cannot save large files directly
   • Not on your premises
3. Externally via cloud compute provider
   • Financial overhead
   • Not on your premises (data storage policy issues?)
   • Can save files directly if set up

With thanks to

Ashley Scarlett

Ramzy Abou-Zeid

References

[1]

B. Jefferson, S. Dimosthenous, P. Frankel, C. Race, R. Thomas, and A. Wilson, “Ampletracks.” Available: https://github.com/Ampletracks/Ampletracks

Thank you!