Hi all,
Wondering if it’s possible to calculate the number of tips a run will use? Our method reads an xml worklist and detemines the pipetting steps. The desired worklist varies from run to run, and can have up to (rough estimation) 500-800 pipetting steps. Is there a way to count the required dispenses at the start of the run and tell the user how many of each tip size to load? Hope that makes sense.
I used to have a submethod to do this (in my last job, so I don’t have access to it anymore unfortunately). It will involve you simply knowing how many liquid transfer are required per sample based on the details of the worklist and then doing some maths. You could write a nice submethod that takes all the factors as arguments and spits out the answer for you. Have a Venus library with a tip calculation submethod for each individual Venus method you have if you want to be organised. Sorry I couldn’t give you the answer you were looking for!
just run the method in simulation and use the get current sequence for the tips to calculate the total number of tips.
I trace out my tip sequences at the end of the run and then use that to calculate tip usage. I gets alittle crazy if you reuse tip sequences though.
I suppose if you count tip ejects to waste you can’t go wrong
This is a fantastic question and I hope someone maybe even from Hamilton has an answer.
This would be important to have for making sure enough tips have been loaded before a method starts, especially when used in tandem with the tip counting library.
Can’t tell you the amount of times during development the tips have run out and this aborts the run, for longer runs this can be detrimental especially for overnight runs if the method aborts or even pauses due to lack of available tips.
we have solved this problem in our lab, we used json file where we get the runlist of all steps and we jsut calculate it befoer we start pipetting and show it to users
Yeah, so our method does create all the arrays and pipette steps based on the worklist selected, but I don’t think it actually counts them up beforehand, and to further complicate things it will calculate one set of steps (grouping liquids of similar viscosity together), complete them, and then the next, and so on, for up to 10 subgroups, so every step isn’t calculated before the run begins.
Haha I’m glad you understand my pain! We are hoping to start overnight runs as some dispenses can take 6-8 hours. It would be a killer to come in the next morning to a half-completed run and a block that’s been sitting open to the air overnight.
If your workflow is using a standard number of tips per sample the math is fairly straight forward. If you need 3 tips per sample, you grab the number of samples from the worklist, multiply by 3 and that’s the total number you should need for the run. Additionally, I like to set it up where the tip counting math is done before deck loading (that number is presented to the user) and after the user selects the number of tips on deck in the tip loading screen (NTR or HSL), the method grabs the current and last position of the tip seq does some math to determine how many tips are on deck, and compares to the number of tips needed. If there’s less than needed add a prompt to add more tips. Put the tip loading and checking in an endless loop that only breaks if you’ve got enough tips loaded. This avoids the annoyance of running out of tips and aborting half way through the method. Hope this helps.
if you do aliquotions and re-pickups, it may be not that straight forward, but basically just calculate the numbers dynamically