most industry software in this area is garbage. i've seen the tecan software in operation; those folks should be embarrassed.
> Definitely catering to the DIY crowd.
i'm tempted to get one and see if we can't get it into production. the up front cost is only a bit more than an annual service contract for a tecan machine which doesn't do much more, and is less flexible.
Their hardware was also total crap. Both the main pump and tip cleaning pump failed on me two times without any notification being thrown, the arm failed once, tips broke countless times. Our regional Tecan rep was on a first name basis with me for awhile and I wasn't even the owner of the machine.
I almost ended up taking a Tecan engineer certification class just so I could use the equipment as a knowledgeable user. Tecan also wanted to charge me something like 15 grand for an arm and tip solution which would handle 1536 well plates which I was able to replicate with 1 cent worth of plastic shims and a few of their black 10 uL tips -_-
I will absolutely recommend that my lab looks into buying one of these.
It is crazy to me that we are the first lab automation company to bring best practices of consumer tech UX and engineering to the wet lab, but its true. We're the first to use continuous integration / delivery, Agile development, usability testing, easy APIs / DSLs -- the list goes on. Would love to work with you and restore your faith in what lab automation can be!
nobody shops for a $250k scientific instrument on the basis of the control software, unfortunately. it's all about the machine's resolution or speed or something compared to the competitors.
or even just what you're familiar with from your previous laboratory.
> Then you have giant turds like LabVIEW by National Instruments who really should know better. I really don't know why it is so popular.
they dump a lot of money into undergrad lab/education. or did, anyways. and 20 years ago if you just wanted to pull some one-off analog sensors into a PC for an industrial process (without being an EE), NI hardware/software might very well have been the cheapest/easiest/fastest way to do it.