How does the Venus "Liquid Following" option map to firmware commands?

Hamilton (Venus)
1

I noticed that in the firmware reference for the “Aspiration of liquid using CoRe 96 Head” (command C0EA), there is no boolean that directly maps to the Venus option “Liquid Following”.

How does Venus translate the liquid following option to firmware?

It would seem like liquid following happens at the firmware level since the Aspirate firmware command expects values such as

  • Tube 2nd section height measured from “zm”
  • Tube 2nd section ratio

Which would make you think that liquid following happens at the firmware level, since it varies depending on the geometry of the well and the liquid class afaik.

Does anyone know if liquid following is done in Venus? Or does it happen in firmware?

2

After a deeper dive:

The only firmware option that changes when having liquid following on/off is:

  • Liquid surface sink distance at the end of aspiration

But it’s not exactly clear to me what this option changes. It seems to change based on labware, but not based on immersion depth.

4

And what does that parameter describe?

I don’t think that it’s how much to go down during the whole aspirate step, from my testing it looks like it’s measuring how much to stay above the absolute bottom of the well at the end of the aspirate step (I understand that the two values are almost the same).

It also remains unclear to me why we’re passing in well geometry at the firmware level

5

I don’t know the purpose, but from what I can tell “Liquid surface sink distance at the end of aspiration” is how far would the head need to descend while aspirating in order to pipette the correction curve adjusted volume if it started pipetting at the top of the container, but only based on the definition of the top segment of the container.