Thanks so much for sharing all those ideas, really appreciate the enthusiasm! Here are a couple of follow-up thoughts:
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One of the nice things about these addressable LEDs is that we only need a single control board for the entire Fluent deck, since the LEDs can be daisy-chained. I don’t have strong feelings about which board to use, but I do like ESP32s in general. Looking into whether we can tie directly into the Tecan’s onboard I/O is a great suggestion. I’ll explore that further!
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The notion of having 3D-printed tabs or a Lynx-like solution is really appealing. Maybe we can machine small “rims” or “channels” on the nest where 3D-printed tabs can snap in. That way it’s easy to replace or adjust them for slight plate variations without having to remanufacture the entire nest.
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We have two Fluent 1080s, so a per-nest cost of around $50 is still manageable for us. But I get how that might add up if someone has a larger fleet. If the design is open-sourced, perhaps people can choose whichever manufacturing route (machining vs. printing) fits their budget or number of instruments.
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Thanks for sharing the 3D model link! I tried printing that nest before but didn’t have the best results, probably needed to dial in my 3D printer settings a bit more. Machining felt like the more reliable approach for now. Still, I’ll definitely provide a 3D-printable version (or even better, a parametric OpenSCAD script) so others can tweak and iterate on the design more easily.
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I actually considered just running a light strip along the deck, but I wasn’t a big fan of the aesthetics. The integrated LEDs in the nest seemed neater to me. That said, I can see how an external strip would be more flexible and maybe simpler to install, so it’s definitely worth keeping in mind.
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The top hole isn’t strictly necessary indeed. We don’t work with light-sensitive materials (yet), but good to take that into consideration!
Thanks again for all the feedback! I’ll keep refining the design, and once everything’s finalized, I’ll share the open-source files so the community can adapt them as needed.