Dynamic Tip Handling (FluentControl)

Tecan
1

I just want to put this on the internet so any other users don’t experience the frustration I did and can google this.

When using the dynamic tip handling setting with the “Load Worklist” command, be careful with the syntax. FluentControl only accepts one version of the letter “µ” (there are two, one is the mathematical symbol and one is the greek letter). Feel free to copy the one above.

So if you use the wrong µ, then your dynamic tip handling won’t work. However fluent control won’t give you an error message, it will just pick up whatever tips you specified as default

worklist
worklist866×309 40.6 KB

So the proper syntax is:

8:FCA DiTi 10µl;30:FCA DiTi 50µl Filtered;

Which means:
10µl tips will be used for anything up to 8 uL
50µl Filtered tips will be used for anything above 8 uL and up to 30 uL
The tip you select in the command will be used for everything else

To find these tip names, you need to go to “custom attributes” and use the name there (circled in red because there’s very intuitively 3 different yet similar names here)

custom attributes
custom attributes631×553 74.5 KB

Since these files are uneditable, I couldn’t simply copy the name there, so I kept coming up with issues since I was using the wrong µl sign (but fluentcontrol didn’t see fit to tell me that was what was wrong)

Of course, none of this is on the tecan knowledge portal or the F1 help article on the machine

Hopefully this helps some poor soul out there someday!

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2

UUUUFFFF sounds like you have had some hard days of debugging!!
Thanks for sharing, maybe one day I will remember this if my worklist doesn’t choose the right tips!

1 Like
3

Doesn’t the Manual for Fluent Control contain this info with an actual example?

Am I misremembering?

4

Yeah, it contains this info Luis, but it’s rather cryptic where exactly you get the information for the syntax from, so I copied some of it down for the entire example. The help article
doesn’t mention the specific µ sign, nor does it tell you where to get the names of the labware (or which name in fact)

** I have no way of knowing if this is resolved in recent versions, I’m on 3.0.16

5

Good point. There’s an informational gap with some of these commands and the manual does a decent job with most but not all use cases.

1 Like
6

Thanks for posting this. Just found it and have been struggling with the worklists for 10ul and 50ul tips (made two separate ones for each tip type), but this is way better and leaner in script lines.
My issues: use of incorrect tip names, unclear use of : and ; but now finally solved.

Dirk

1 Like