Feature request: support unloading labware in the HTTP API

rickwierenga · March 1, 2024, 3:36am

It’d be great if the HTTP API supported removing labware, analogous to the loadLabware command.

I’d open a PR for this by using loadLabware as a base (with just one parameter: labware name), but I find 1152 mentions of LoadLabware in 237 files in the opentrons repo. What is the best approach for this?

github.com/Opentrons/opentrons

feat: unload labware to reuse deck space in a protocol

opened 08:50PM - 24 Jul 20 UTC

closed 08:31PM - 21 Feb 24 UTC

rachelglover

workaround available papi-v2 feature-request robot-svcs

# Overview I have some protocols that would really benefit from a protocol wh…ere the user can replace labware with something else. For example, part way through a protocol a tip rack will be empty. The protocol could be paused with an instruction for the user to remove the empty tip rack and replace with a 96-well PCR plate. This would enable more complex protocols which require a lot of tips or plates to re-use space on the deck without using multiple scripts. # Implementation details I'm thinking something along the lines of: `protocol.pause("Remove the empty tip rack from position 7 and replace with a 96 well PCR plate") **protocol.unload_labware('opentrons_opentrons_96_tiprack_300ul', 7)** protocol.load_labware('biorad_96_wellplate_200ul_pcr',7) `

rickwierenga · March 1, 2024, 4:06am

In the meantime, I decided to call moveLabware with "newLocation": "offDeck". Hacky, but equivalent for my purposes. (add move labware · rickwierenga/opentrons-python-api@c23f862 · GitHub)

Alex · March 1, 2024, 8:23pm

I guess that’s an official way to offload labware

Shinedalgarno · April 16, 2024, 9:58am

Does using

del protocol.deck[“7”]

not work? That’s what I’ve always done in my protocols before. Maybe that doesn’t work with HTTP

EDIT: My bad, I see that this is the top comment in the thread you linked and is probably not what you’re looking for, ignore me

rickwierenga · April 16, 2024, 1:17pm

The thread linked is official OT code. PLR code is separate.

Indexing into the OT deck with [] (or del deck[x]) does not work in PLR yet for the Opentrons deck, but that’s actually a very natural way to do this! Carrier is very similar. Do you want to PR this?

You can unassign resources using the standard resource.unassign(). This works now (see commit linked above). This is done using the HTTP/PLR via this move-off-deck-hack.