Hi Folks,
My place has a Tecan Fluent with a Carousel attached to it. The carousel comes with an internal barcode reader (basically a Cytomat). Has anybody got any experience with integrated carousels as I would like to load the carousel, scan the carousel and pick plates by barcode to the worktable for cherry picking with a worklist. Where I am coming unstuck is that Tecan seem to have provided no way of inserting the location of scanned plates into the inventory so that they can be called. Does anybody have any insight into this?
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It’s been a long time, but I set up a Fluent+Carousel at the CDC for serology way back when.
If I remember, I think I had to just have a nested array for like HotelPos[8][21] where the outside array was hotel and inside array was position. After that I think it was just telling the carousel to access the plate.
If this is for tips or you just need a bunch of reagents, I do remember being able to make a submethod to basically put back tipbox[i] and get tipbox[i+1] and run that on empty tip. Similarly for plates and storage, I made a subscript to pull plate[i], add bfr, place plate[i] back and get plate[i+1] - rinse repeat.
Hey @rodge_cyp I currently work with several Tecan Fluents with an integrated carousel. I am assuming that when you say “inserting the location of scanned plates into the inventory” you are talking about adding the plate virtually to the work table at runtime. To do this Tecan provids a VB (.NET) script which is run after the carousel is scanned which uses the .txt file generated by the scanning step to add the labware (virtually) to the worktable. This process is dependent on a .dll (LabwerxScriptingLibrary.dll) and a runtime worklist that matches the barcodes to the other information needed by the VB script and Fluent to create the labware (i.e. name, labware name, site etc.) I would reach out directly to Tecan to see if they can provide this if it doesn’t exist on your control computer.
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Thanks Sam, I cannot find this dll and looks like precisely the functionality that I am missing.
Hi Sam,
Further to your previous message, you mention a VB script. Would you expect that to be provided along with the LabwerxScritpingLibrary.dll?
If not, could you provide a copy or a breakdown of what the VB script does?
thanks
Roger
Sorry, misread your existing reply so ignore my last question
What you can do is first create a labware group of the carousel locations to store labware.
Once the plates have been scanned, you can use the command lwlabel = GetLabwareLabel({plate barcode}), where {plate barcode} is the barcode of the plate you want to load.
To load the plate, use Transfer Labware command using lwlabel as value under “Labware” entry box. The carousel will retrieve that plate with barcode and the RGA will move it to the specified target deck location.
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Is that .net script to run after the ScanTower command executed automatically or is it something one needs to locate? Also do you know what the .txt file path is/ what it is called by default?
So yes its something that needs be located/called using a “Start VB” command which is done after the scan step is complete. The .net script specifically uses a ReformatCarouselScan() function from the .dll I mentioned above to reformat the outputted .txt file into something that can be returned in a Fluent Control readable format. The path I am aware of for the scan output is “.\Tecan\VisionX\Output\Carousel_R_PosList.txt” our Carousel is installed on the right side of the deck so if you had it on the left side I believe the name would be different (i.e. Carousel_L_PosList.txt) Hope this helps!