The link to the experimental instrumentation is provided by interfacing AiiDA with our instrument automation platform, tomato, developed for this purpose. The Python-based tomato includes a job scheduling daemon, device drivers, and a user front-end utility called ketchup. The usage patterns of this library are modelled after common scheduling tools, such as Sun Grid Engine, OpenPBS or Torque, familiar to users of high-performance computing. We refer the keen reader to the online project documentation for further details. * However, other instrument automation platforms could be interfaced with AiiDA by writing an appropriate scheduler plugin.