The Accursed Hamilton MVP

A family friend and former professor of mine reached out over email recently with a request to help a PhD student get some motorized lab equipment working with their python control script. I thought to myself "Well I've been there before; serial connections with python aren't exactly straightforward." and scheduled to meet up.

The grad student was working in a chemistry lab and needed to automate an ancient Hamilton MVP RS-232 serial-controlled valve. He'd already done a lot of troubleshooting and digging into pyserial and the MVP user guide, but none of the serial commands seemed to work. We started perusing a crumbling physical copy of the user manual and then set to double checking and troubleshooting.