Biomek Guide

Streaming Biomek

Wednesday, June 27, 2007

Updates and lessons learned

Sofware upgrade story

Well lots has gone on with the robot recently.

To make a long story short the tech support guy, Phil, suggested to update the Biomek software to build 14. He couldn't do it since he didn't have the software on him, but had the software sent to me.

I did it on my own, since he was on vacation, and it was a learning experience. I called into phone support for guidance, and here is how it went.

So it is important to know that the "export all" funciton under the file option does not really mean "export all". This only exports methods. So they should call it "export methods" rather than "export all". So if you are doing a re-install remember to do a separate export for methods, instrument files, decks, hardware, etc. Otherwise you have to start from scratch.

I got lucky and found some files to recover, but it took me a whole day to rebound from the "export all" mishap.

Also, since Norton's Ghost is on the Biomek computer I suggest that you clone the whole drive on DVD and recover in the event of disaster.

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Other news--Probe Replacement

Probe 7 of the span-8 was leaking ever so little, so Phil sent a replacement part and I replaced the whole probe. The leaking has gone away. If you experience any leaking be sure to call tech support. The liquid is from the inside of the machine and will contaminate your sample as well as cause a pipetting error.

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Dilution of powdered chemicals and Tranfer from file feature.

The Cutler lab has a new library, but it came in powders. The library requires dilution with DMSO. Lots of lessons were learned about the tranfer from file feature.

Each chemical has a unique molecular weight, and as such requires a unique volume of DMSO to achieve a constant molarity. This task requires tranfer from file. It took me about four days to figure out how to do this, and with some intervention from Beckman forum users I discovered that if one wants to use a reservoir as a source they must call all the wells "1".

Don't bother looking in the manual, as it does not even support a source reservoir.

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