Hello!
My group is currently on the market for a colony picker. We already own or have knowledge of a few, but I was curious if anybody here has any familiarity with the K8 or K6 Colony pickers (made by K biosystems).
They appear to be a UK based company. I don’t expect a lot of support available in the US, but I do like the layout and some features of their system. However, it does seem like they are a small company so I really haven’t been able to find a lot of information online.
Would be super curious to find folks that have been able to work with one before. Thanks in advance.
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I’m decently familiar with these systems. We completely overhauled the software on our K8’s by discarding everything that Kbio programmed (in LabView), hiring a software consultancy to rewrite everything at the controller level, then having in-house devs build a user software on top (with Python packages for image recognition, etc.). Years of work.
Hardware is over-engineered and unreliable due to the sheer number of moving parts and systems.
The only advantage of the K8 is the high throughput. We had much better experiences with the Singer, and the Qpix is supposed to be pretty good too (anecdotally).
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Ooooo ok. Thanks for your response!! Is there a particular reason you guys completely overhauled the software?? And yeah that’s unfortunate about all the moving parts leading to unreliability. We have been looking at the Qpix HT as an option but we have colleagues at other sites that have remarked about unreliability due to external robotic arm and scheduling software. But I guess even if everything is “put together” like it is here there still that danger. We are currently trying to get our Pixl to be more high throughput but we’ve had some issues with software crashes in the past. What type of source plates did you end up getting yours set up for? Also, if you don’t mind me asking, how long have you guys had your picker for?
I wouldn’t know the specific reasons, other than that the original software was “bad”. Maybe a lack of LIMS integration capabilities?
We had the K8s for close to five years now and set them up with sbs format flat agar plates (and we had to re-engineer the plate media production due to agar leveling issues).
After years of hardware and software engineering work we got the K8s to be pretty reliable.
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