Has anyone been successful in jailbreaking this thing?
It is the only robot within my price range with the specs I need to execute my workflows, but the canned protocols simply don’t work for me.
My lab is budget-constrained, and we can’t justify the budget to spring for the Nimbus or any higher-spec instrument.
If anyone thinks it’s possible, I may be willing to entertain a bounty for succeeding.
Thanks, it doesn’t seem like the best fit, but I reached out to them to see if they can help me out.
Do you have any specifics on what you’re trying to do with the prep that you don’t think is possible?
I’m less familiar with the Prep than some of the other Hamilton offerings, but I’m curious about what you’re looking to do that’s outside of the available options? Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for tearing stuff down to the studs to build up a custom solution, but it can become a pretty big time sink (and also cost you more in the end if you end up cooking a robot if an anti-self-destruct feature accidentally gets circumvented).
To (hopefully) give a little bit of answer to your original question, firmware commands are probably going to be your best bet to get non-standard behaviors out of the instrument. I’ll give the standard warning: they come with a pretty steep and unforgiving learning curve, so keep that hand over the power switch while you’re testing stuff out. Because of this, I typically only resort to firmware commands as an absolute last resort, and as sparingly as possible.
In what way? The preps software / interface makes it a terrible product. The add on software makes it actually useable and super easy to program. I guess I missed your use case.
I need to execute some non-standard operations. The one furthest from what seems to be available is the ability to aspirate from an input well, move to an output well, and reside there for several 10s of seconds without dispensing, then move the tip to trash.
Do you know how to access the firmware? I was told this instrument was firewalled off fairly well. I’m at the point of last resort now, and if you can guide me to the resources to be able to hijack it, I would appreciate it.
Definitely use @rickwierenga’s jailbroken ML prep backend, it is precisely what you need & is also free (unlike other suggestions in this thread). Here is the work-in-progress branch
Hi @TheodorusRex,
I can confirm, PyLabRobot has a (mostly) functional MLPrep integration (i.e. backend).
It has never been a priority so far and we therefore just worked on it on weekends here and there. @rickwierenga has done most of the work (see GitHub repo) and I’m trying to validate what I can with my slightly differently configured MLPrep (2 independent channels + fixed-8-channel system) on the other side of the world.
Questions:
We also see the MLPrep as a wonderful machine from its hardware perspective, and would instantly buy more… if there wasn’t the issue with its software making it almost completely unusable.
Note: there is a lot of hearsay regarding how “dangerous” “alternative” machine control software is and how difficult it is to release machines out of the jail that is holding them back from solving our problems 
It’s really exciting that PyLabRobot can work with the Prep now.
I understand why it hasn’t been a priority, but it would be really useful for our needs.
To answer your questions:
It’s a very impressive instrument, especially at the price point it’s being offered at. I’ll try it out and do my best not to crash it
please let me know if i can answer any questions!
Hey @TheodorusRex Have you looked into the Opentrons Flex liquid handler? Opentrons uniquely has an open source platform, allowing our users to easily customize their commands. Opentrons · GitHub