BenchCel Customize Grippers

Does anyone have experience with customizing the gripper or pads for the BenchCel? I am using a 384 BioRad PCR plate and there are holes near where the gripper picks up the plate. Most of the movement is fine with adjusting the teaching/offset, but plates drop once in a while when the BenchCel picks up from one particular stacker from 4 stackers. Any insight will be great!! Thank you!

Have you already played with the gripper offset? And have you fine tuned the sensor intensity? That a tricky one, because sensors tend to be quite different from each other and you have to find a good trade off.

@Beverly In the Labware Editor, You could try setting the “Gripper Holding Plate Position” to a higher number under the Benchcel R tab on the bottom.

This will hold the plate tighter when moving. Please try with a test plate before using sample plates.

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Hi Dave and Mauro, thank you for your quick replies yesterday!

We went straight to test these plates after increasing the “Gripper Holding Plate Position” and that worked really well. We also updated the labware def (for reference). We weren’t seeing the plate drops/flips after adjusting.

Some thoughts I had were if increasing the grip would wear out the gripper over time and if that meant more maintenance. I’ll be keeping that in mind as we continue to use the BenchCel.

Thank you again!

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@Beverly I am glad it worked! The grippers are pretty hardy and will withstand the extra grip. Also, the gripper points are made of a harder metal and should not wear over time.

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That’s great to know! I had experience where Tecan gripper spikes had to be replaced.

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