Hi all, I am wondering how you guyz handle version control for Tecan’s fluent control. I used use Hamilton and Git but Tecan seems more challenging. Any ideas are most appreciated.
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I believe @Eli.Fine was previously looking into this with a team but not sure how that went.
I guess my question to you is, how much do you truly want to version control?
The Tecan files are all XML and I believe they can be dragged and dropped. If you want the superficial level of version control that people get with Hamilton files, it should not be hard. If you want to potentially branch and merge, I’ve been able to successfully modify those XML files and then revalidate them with the software used during checksum.
I haven’t done full database swaps yet but shouldn’t be tough to test on a VM.
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The entire automation team at Resilience was laid off to “streamline efficiency” last year, so there’s not really any new news to report from that attempt at Tecan version control.
At my new role we have no Tecans 
, some of our main work is using some OEM Hamilton pipettes attached to an Industrial arm—all our own Python code, all the time , so version control is super easy
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woah!
@ luisvillaautomata
How do you revalidation with checksum? I don’t see it in the manual; is there a separate documentation?
Thanks.
Python all the way 
In case you add a complete Microlab STAR to this setup at some point, let me know so you can keep that sweet benefit of using version control 
Great point, I have validated checksums in the past in an unorthodox way but this was years ago and super not approved so don’t want to discuss that here.
I had an issue a few years ago with the way the software was parsing LC files so I created a LC parser in Python over 2 beers at an airport that went through my VM LC’s, checked for that specific error and then corrected it. I believe upon booting up the software, FC flagged that I had unvalidated checksums and then asked if wanted to validate them. Super easy stuff.
The XML’s are massive but cake for any competent SWE.
With that said, I just installed the latest FC version on a VM so I’ll try something out for it.
LC’s are sort of a last domino for me, I version control everything else and program my Fluent externally from the software lol. Python? Rust? Julia? Whatever.
I tried comparing two versions of a script (in XML) to find the difference, but that’s about it; could not find an easy way to merge.
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@luisvillaautomata How do you organize which files are which since they all have the GUID as the name? Can that be changed? I know you can at least know whether it’s a script vs method etc based on the file type, but it’s pretty tedious to have to hover over each file or open it up to see which object the file is for
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Pretty interested in your workflow for programming Tecan fluent outside of fluent control? Did you build a translation layer in python? How does this work?
Thanks,
Colin