I believe I’ve heard of people using the robot arm to lift (or raise) a tab to move the tilt station from one position to the other. This could be pretty easily achieved with a Tecan and robot vectors with their RoMa.
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Yes or the 8-channel/single channel.
this is pretty cool!
And cheap!
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Out of interest, are there any advantages to using this over using a normal hamilton tilt module? It’s nice how it can tilt both ways I guess…
I don’t use Hamilton’s any more and when I did, I did not use their tilt module so I can’t speak to the module’s limitations or strengths.
The advantage for me is that the TiltStation is platform agnostic and has a familiar compact footprint from a company whose products I have used quite a bit.
Q Instruments also supports interoperable communication standards so that’s huge for me as I think about scale and flexibility.
Function wise, seems to check all of the boxes.
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Fair points!
luckily hamilton shared the firmware spec for the tilt module, so it is truly platform agnostic now! hamilton is the best at making hardware that works, so we use all hamilton hardware on a non-hamilton software stack
That’s the spirit!
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I use a Hamilton tilt module on a Vantage for cell culture in a 6-well format. For what it’s worth, the device works well for us. The 10 degree tilt is sufficient to evacuate all of the media, we rock our plates with the module to wash with PBS, and the device runs reliably unattended on weekends.
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we use Hamilton Tilit module all the time and it works great.
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@JBurford Do you mind sharing your 6-well plate definition file?
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Hello @partycorgi, For working in 6WPs, the plate definition is a standard Corning_Costar 6WP_Fl. I tried to upload it here, but got an unauthorized file type error. Feel free to reach out to me at evans.burford@bms.com and I can send you the file. With respect to tilting the plate there are two options:
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Hamilton gave us a custom library, ‘ADJUST_TiltLabware’ that allows you to tilt a sequence on the fly. Perhaps @EricSindelar_Hamilton might be able to help you get this library.
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Flex your trigonometry skills and calculate where the X,Y,Z coordinates should be for each well position. Then manually stack three pieces of labware ensuring that the center of the well aligns with where your theoretical X,Y,Z coordinates should be. You can now build your ‘tilted’ sequence using these stacked pieces of labware.
Best of luck!
Sorry for the delay, but the function ‘ADJUST_TiltLabware’ is found in the Labware Property Query custom library.
I’ve uploaded the latest version of the library to the Hamilton Libraries folder here.
There are several ways to approach tilting labware in VENUS. You can use a library like the one above to adjust on the fly or define tilted labware on your system deck (you would then need two definitions, one for zero tilt and one for whatever degree of tilt). I uploaded some examples of 96-, 12-, and 6-well labware definitions for flat and 10 degree tilt in the Labware folder here.
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Let me know if you want the STL files for this. We have several customers that have modified these for specific angles to use with different # of well plates.