Had a long flight so I created this demo method to meet the requirements.
Here’s how I approached it using Hamilton Venus. I didn’t have labware definitions or images for your specified labwares so I used similar Axygen labware instead. 450uL Vbottom and 240uL Trough.
Requirements:
2 different instrument configurations, 1 script.
In Venus you can query the firmware of the current instrument running the program for its Serial Number so you can have the same method behave differently depending on the instrument running it. I’m overwriting this value to be “Iggy” or “Ziggy.” If you had multiple Iggys and Ziggys you could have the method query for whether the instrument has a 96 Head installed, or how many 1mL channels are installed, but this meets the requirement. All of this hardware configuration information is retrievable by the method during run-time.
2 Tasks, 1 script.
Input file has a column for TaskNumber, and then has the input columns for each tasks specific parameters.
Ziggy handles Task 1 by first transferring a full rack of tips to a tip pickup adapter and then doing right side offset pickup of 1 column of tips and using that column of tips the same way as channels.
User selected tip size.
All 3 tip sizes are present on the deck, tip size to use comes from the input file. You can QC check whether the selected tip size can accommodate the desired volume, and either tell the user it can’t be done or split the volume down to do multiple transfers with the smaller tip size until desired volume is achieved. The instrument auto loads and scans the tip rack barcodes and will prompt if the wrong rack is loaded in the wrong location. I believe this meets the “Difficult” requirement.
Mixing
Whether to mix or not is controlled by the input file in both methods. Task 1 has an extra check that if (Mix = Yes, Current Plate is Last Plate, and Number Of Plates > 1) Then Mix, else don’t mix.
Iggy & Ziggy Task 1
Ziggy Task 2
Let me know if I missed any but overall pretty simple to do in Venus only about 160 lines of code.