Fluent MCA384 aspirating from top of variable liquid volume

Hi all! New to Tecan. I am trying to get my Fluent MCA384 to aspirate from the top of the liquid in 384 well plates that already have the liquid when added to the Fluent worktable. Does anyone have commands/ liquid class/microscript that works for this?

Here’s what I tried, an applications specialist took a quick look and said it should work but it didn’t:

  1. Made a liquid class and set to aspirate from Z known position
  2. Made a user prompt in the script to set a variable “BCellSupVol” to the volume the user knows is in the plate
  3. Used set variable command with SetAttribute to set the attribute “Volume” to BCellSupVol for each plate. I used this expression in a loop with loop variable=cycle: SetAttribute(“B Cell Culture[”+cycle+“]”,“Well[1].Volume”, BCellSupVol)

How do I get the miscroscript to calculate the height to aspirate from based on a user input of volume? It looks like its calculating based off of “availableVolume” which I can’t seem to set from the set variable command.

Thanks!

What version of Fluent Control are you on?

Hi, so sorry for the delayed reply. Thought I was going to get an email when someone replied! I changed my settings so now I will.

I’m using 3.4.10

that just sets the all the cycles of plates’ well 1 volume to BCellSupVol

If you want all the wells in the plate to be set to the same volume BCellSupVol. then the equation should be something like this.
assuming cycle is the number of wells in the plate which would be 384.

loop variable=cycle: SetAttribute(“B Cell Culture[001]”,“Well[”+cycle+“].Volume”, BCellSupVol)

I would also suggest that you mod the liquid class to goto z_liquid-(SubMergedDept), there is noting to pippet at z liquid surface, unless the labware definitions were wrong to start with.

Yes, it was my intention to set well 1 volume to BCellSupVol for each plate; the cycle is for the number of plates on the deck (which is variable) so it would set the volume of well 1 for every plate. The idea was because its pipetting with an MCA head, it would go down the same point for every well based on well 1. When I had talked to someone at Tecan, they said setting just well 1’s volume should be sufficient, but its appearing that thats not the case.

There’s a good tutorial of it somewhere that shows you how to pull a volume into the microscript but I want to warn you that in Fluent Control 3.5 they fixed a major bug where it sometimes failed to pull that value into the microscript.

Reach out to helpdesk and they should have a step by step guide and maybe give you more details about that upgrade.

Some links from this forum that can help,

https://labautomation.io/t/in-fluentcontrol-is-it-possible-to-share-variables-between-script-and-liquid-classes/4597/3

https://labautomation.io/t/fluent-control-wishlist/1193/15

Thank you very much!