A slightly different kind of post…
The Tecan Fluent deck is highly modular, ergo there are essentially limitless configuration opportunities.
To navigate a limitless world, I created a Tecan Fluent Inspo board on FigJam .
May this help & inspire you with your design decisions.
If you want to contribute inspo material, let me know.
this is fun!
I really wanna see an inspo board with the most effective/efficient/optimal deck layouts for a particular process, so we can learn from existing deck design strategies built over months of iteration
That’s not a bad idea especially with larger work cells which can come in many more form factors.
Also interestingly once you see enough configurations, the more creative elements begin to pop out which leads to more systems that want to adopt those specific elements… and thus forever propelling our creativity forward.
I have a Fluent deck for chromatography if that could be usefull?
Yeah, feel free to share!
We have a bit of a cramped deck. Should I post it here or on the INSPO board?
Either one, I can place it on the inspo board for you later on!
Interesting, always love seeing these digital twins of the deck.
A few questions,
Have you constructed a heatmap of your deck?
I’m personally curious about how much of it you actually use because that’s a lot of nest positions.
Without knowing anything else about your process, I would consider swapping the 61mm thru deck waste chute for an FCA thru deck because it opens up a 61mm nest position (functional and active!) and minimizes the waste position to a 2-3 grip spot (less functional, passive). You could even slow it into grid locations 7-8.
Do you have a way to create a heatmap for each positions used on the Tecan?
I can only visually overlay my workflows over each other for now but if I were to construct a tool…
First, if you’re not commenting actions to the AuditTrail, you absolutely should.
Second, abstracting your workflows so they’re programmatic also allows you to query in advance where things are and will be. If you’re dragging and dropping your commands into scripts, it’s tougher and your best bet is what I stated above.
Final boss challenge: parse the Logviewer Logs for positional data but eeesh.
This seems too much for me. I’ll see what data I can extract from the Zeia file and then see if I can create a worktable grid file that I can use to plot the data in a heat map. Then later I could add a network graph for spacial connection to see what locations are used most.
Could take some time, but I’ll go on holiday first and then I might have some time 
Yeah I thought about your solution but…
Could take some time
If you develop that tool it will be super useful.
The following is for Google searchers of the future,
The benefit of building robust audit trail commenting in your scripts from the start is that you can query that information the way you’d parse a CSV, toss into data lake for analysis or/and in the future analyze it with new language models.
Furthermore the benefit of a programmatic interface with the software is that I can send this data directly to a DB and get the runtime data without touching my scripts. I can abstract the logging so I don’t have to go back in and modify the core script functionality.
Tecan export files are ZEIAs which are basically just zip files that are composed of XML files that are linked only by GUIDs. Your .xscr file is maybe 3000-5000 lines long and your .xwsp file is probably 20000-35000 lines long which isn’t too bad if you have a couple of workflows but the complete information for any given is a web of files communicating with each other to extract data.
Tecan export files are ZEIAs which are basically just zip files that are composed of XML files that are linked only by GUIDs. Your .xscr file is maybe 3000-5000 lines long and your .xwsp file is probably 20000-35000 lines long which isn’t too bad if you have a couple of workflows but the complete information for any given is a web of files communicating with each other to extract data.
I know and about 6 months ago I’ve already wrote an R-script to parse these files to extract all the lines, functions and variables that are used inside one script.
Will need some tweaking adjust it for this purpose and to get it right, but might take a few nights.
I’ll put it on my ‘some time in the future to-do list’ and then see what I can do.
That’s awesome. You’ll want to consider how to incorporate runtime data as well. You’re going to easily get snapshot data from the ZEIA but the value of the heatmap is not just only positional but also time.
1: I just put up a wall to prevent the FCA to go that way, so it doesn’t end up dripping in one of the wrong columns 
2: I think it is just placeholders for plates
3: I dont actually know but i will check up what it is
Hi @luisvillaautomata
In terms of volume, we use the nest positions for culture selection and sub cloning. Sometimes we have 10 source and destination plates.
We unfortunately cannot change the 61mm thru deck as it is part of the BSL-2 setup to drop plates.
Heatmaps is a new idea for me. I’d have to review our audit trail and make sue that all the scrips are logged (we have two other people creating scripts).
Furthermore, this is getting into hard coding, something that is still on my “To Do” list (especially R-). Another factor I’s need to track is tip use per script runtime.
The Heat map sounds really cool. How do you create one? 
