Labtools is a custom platform built for the Neural Circuits Laboratory at the University of Valencia. It brings together two everyday needs:
- A personal + shared inventory to track consumables and equipment, with low-stock alerts and provider management, and
- A lightweight IoT telemetry system (Raspberry Pi Zero 2W) that monitors the animal colony environment (temperature, humidity, light) and notifies researchers on anomalies to support animal welfare.
Purpose and Overview
The lab needed a single place to:
- keep accurate stock across teams and individuals,
- standardize purchases via provider/material mappings, and
- maintain stable conditions around the animal rooms with automated alerting.
Labtools provides a clean UI for inventory workflows and a reliable data pipeline that ingests sensor readings via MQTT, processes them in a Go backend service, persists them, and triggers alerts when thresholds are exceeded.
IoT Monitoring - Animal Colony
Small Raspberry Pi Zero 2W devices collect temperature, humidity, and illuminance via onboard sensors. Devices publish readings over MQTT. A Go service consumes, validates, transforms, stores, and checks thresholds; if anything looks off, it alerts researchers to investigate. The application provides a unified dashboard for monitoring all sensor data in real time and historical values.
System Architecture
┌────────────────────────┐ MQTT ┌──────────────────────────┐
│ Pi Zero 2W + Sensors │ ──────────────▶ │ Ingest (Go) │
│ temp | hum | lux │ │ - Validate & transform │
└────────────────────────┘ │ - Threshold checks │
│ - Persistence │
└─────────────┬────────────┘
│
▼
┌──────────────────┐
│ Database │
│ (timeseries + │
│ inventory) │
└─────────┬────────┘
│
▼
┌─────────────────────────────────┐
│ Web App (Inventory + Telemetry) │
│ - Inventory CRUD & providers │
│ - Live charts & alerts │
└─────────────────────────────────┘
Key Features
- Personal & Shared Inventory: clear separation and easy collaboration
- Low-Stock Indicators: color-coded badges and at-a-glance dashboards
- Provider Management: materials mapped to vendors to speed up orders
- IoT Environment Monitoring: temp/humidity/light telemetry from Pi Zero 2W
- Automated Alerts: threshold-based checks to protect animal welfare
- Auditable History: item changes and sensor trends for traceability
Technology Stack
- Raspberry Pi Zero 2W (sensor nodes)
- MQTT (telemetry transport)
- Go backend service (ingest, transform, thresholds, persistence)
- Database (inventory + time-series telemetry)
- Web UI for inventory, dashboards, and alert management
Note: This is a lab deployment; repository and infrastructure details are private. Reach out if you'd like a technical deep-dive.
Impact
Labtools reduced stock-outs, standardized provider ordering, and added proactive monitoring of animal-room conditions. It turned scattered spreadsheets and manual checks into a single, reliable system the entire lab can trust.