Instrument Management System

Sharing instruments between a group of users in a laboratory setting is a pain. We spend a lot of time running back and forth to a calendar pinned up on the wall next to the instruments seeing what times are available, who we might be able to swap with and how we should best plan out our experimental schedule. (And we are not alone with this problem!) After the machines have been used, we have to charge our users for the time they have used. This means that someone either has to spend lots of time adding up these data from the abovementioned calendars then putting it into excel to calculate the bills.

How inefficient does that sound?

The solution

The Bumblebee project has created a simple to use booking and billing system that draws these two functions together.

The Bumblebee Instrument Management software is based upon: MySQL + Apache httpd + PHP + GPL. This provides a free, flexible system that allows users to book instrument time and then prepare invoices for subsequent charge-outs.

Features

Availability

The Bumblebee software is licenced under the GPL and deployed at the University of Melbourne. Bumblebee is now available through SourceForge.

Anyone interested in helping out on this project is welcome to contact me to offer help.


Last edited: Monday September 5, 2005

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