willcanine

Leland Stanford's horse farm was more like an experimental engine lab, and his "Palo Alto System" set the Valley's course. An excerpt from the new book PALO ALTO: A HISTORY OF CALIFORNIA, CAPITALISM, AND THE WORLD

awesome! excited to work with you!

sorry if my answer is confusing. the short answer is: yes, there will be more (and more in-depth) open-source documentation of OT-2 than with OT-One, and not just limited to dumping everything in a github repo. This is rolling out in the coming weeks as things get finalized.

yes, we love smoothieware! it's existence is one of the main reasons we're able to offer this tech at such an unheard-of low price. we've forked it (available here: https://github.com/Opentrons/SmoothiewareOT) to work with our OT-2 motor controller, which has more stepper drivers than the smoothieboard and is designed to fit on the head of the robot to minimize cabling. full board design (as well as all of our electronics designs) are going up on github in the next few weeks!

hey, thanks! to answer your questions:

1 - yes, our python API can still be your main tool for creating protocols, no one needs to use the GUI if they dont want to. In fact, OT-2 runs a jupyter notebook onboard so you can just connect over wifi / USB, pull up the notebook in your browser, and live code to the robot (as well as run a python script through the App same w/ OT-One).

2 - yes, all OT-One users get a $2000 discount on the OT-2, so starting price for you is $2k :)

totally agree. lowering that "activation energy" is one of the main focuses of our UX design team, and making sure that the machine doesn't break at the smallest bump is a core part of our hardware engineering philosophy. thanks for the input, very validating for us :)

Thanks! Through user research we learned that most labs dont have robots today because 1. they are too expensive and 2. they dont have space in their lab for the huge machines currently available. Thats why we focused on low-cost and compact; the OT-2 is designed to fit on 1/2 of a standard lab bench so biologists can work alongside their robot.

OT-One was deff for the DIY crowd and there are lots of great hacks folks have done on it with our open API and hardware like plasmotron.org or this Alexa integration: https://youtu.be/s4WgCs-tH3o

On the other hand, the OT-2 is designed for the mainstream biologist, the folks that dont want to have to write code or hack hardware, just want something plug-and-play to do their pipetting for them. So far in our usability tests and for beta users, its working! :)

This is exactly the pain we are trying to help in the lab -- your story is all too common!

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!

Thanks Jay! :)

Thank you! Would love to work with you! We are already shipping OT-2 robots, and right now with the amount of demand we have there is a 6 week lead time (though it is increasing fast).

The 96-well head wont be an addition to this robot because it would make it too top heavy and risk tipping it over -- best we can fit on this guy is the 8-channel pipette already available. We'll start considering things like a 96-well head when we decide to move up-market and start making bigger robots, but for now we are very happy to be making lab robots accessible to labs with smaller budgets that today have to do all their pipetting by hand.

yes, we will be open-sourcing the hardware, though not in quite the same way as with the OT-One. All the OT-One parts are off the shelf, 3D printed, or laser-cut, so putting all the files on github makes a lot of sense. But the OT-2 is a lot of custom parts injection molded / extruded / CNC'd by our production team in Shenzhen, and it is a lot harder to both share those designs on our end, and to make anything out of them as a hacker. So we'll be releasing a lot of high fidelity CAD files of the full assembly, as well as deeper dive documentation like this whitepaper on our new pipette designs: https://s3.amazonaws.com/opentrons-landing-img/pipettes/OT-2...

And we're hiring! Come work at the company democratizing sophisticated biotech tools with open-source lab robots https://opentrons.com/jobs

We've designed the API to be an easy step into programming and automation for any bench scientist. Our API makes your code read like a protocol written in your lab notebook, but you can extend it using everything the Python ecosystem has to offer and run it on our affordable lab robots.

With Python fast becoming the language of choice for many scientific computing applications, we are excited to be extending its use in the bio lab.

Full story on SynBioBeta:

http://synbiobeta.com/news/opentrons-new-interface-automated...

Will Canine Opentrons Co-Founder

woops -- should say 'most of our users do NOT already have liquid handling robots...' sorry

Our main competition really isnt those other robots, its people working by hand. Our user experience and the size, shape, feel of our robot on the bench is just totally different than a Tecan. Our machine appeals to scientists who dont want to become an expert at Tecan Script, spend time looking through used parts websites, and repairing old swiss robots :) Would also argue the flexibility point -- there are trade offs. Our machine can fit in a lot more spaces, can use any type of labware you want, can interface with anything that has an API.

Thanks for your thoughts, would love to talk more if you want!

Will

Hi - our robot is great for your application. Send me an email info@opentrons.com and we can talk more about it. We have talked to a number of people interested in the same thing.

Thanks for taking a look at our stuff and taking the time to comment.

As I said below, we have shipped 51 robots so far and most are in daily use by the academic research labs and biotech companies that bought them. Serial dilutions, mother daughter plating, ELISA, PCR prep, ligations/digestions, heat shock transformations, and soon Gibson assembly are the applications most widely run on the OT-One.

Yes we do depress the top of the manual pipette, just like you would do by hand. Do you trust your manual pipetting to be reproducible? Thats exactly the same thing that is happening here. Agreed we need a dye test to show reproducibility/precision/accuracy, and it is currently in the works (you can find a scale test showing accuracy/precision on our blog, blog.opentrons.com). But from running the machine for 6 months and getting good biological data on it, I can tell you that it reliably hits the desired volume when correctly calibrated. And it can hit different volumes each transfer w/o setting the pipette, it just presses the plunger down the desired amount (say you want 100ul using a p200, it pushes down 50%). The electronic pipettes you are talking about cost more than our whole robot.

Our current users disagree with you that we need to be faster than a grad student, thought when turned up to full speed it is faster (but needs to be bolted to the bench when you turn it up that fast). In fact, the grad students that use the machine love it because they can go do other things and not worry about errors in their pipetting. Also, the PRO version of the OT-One can hold a single and an 8-channel pipette at the same time. Users can choose a p1000, p200, or p10, and we can consistently transfer 1ul of liquid fusing both single and multi-channel p10.

Actually, most of our users do already have liquid handling robots when they buy an OT-One, and our machine is often labs' first form of automation. Users like this have had lots of success porting their manual protocols onto the OT-One, and you can see the different choices already available for users to download and run on Mix.Bio.

I agree we could use a lot more info on our website, and we are working on it. Till then, happy to talk more details if your interested, just email info@opentrons.com and we can set up a time to talk.

Thanks!

Will

appreciate the input -- what elements are not working on your iPad?

No, we are not competing with Hamilton, Tecan, Cybio, or any of the other companies currently making big lab robots. i think of robots like the Hamilton Star as 'mainframe' machines. They are really great for centralized high-throughput, if you can afford one and have an automation engineer on the team.

The OT-One is aiming to be like a 'PC' rather than a 'mainframe' -- affordable, easy to use, and at a scale manageable by individuals. And with Mix.Bio you can download protocols to run, or design them in your browser. It is a lab robot for day-to-day use replacing manual pipetting.

Happy to talk to anyone about our robot! Currently have 51 machines in labs around the world doing things from serial dilutions to Gibson assembly and shipping more every week. Email info@opentrons.com to get in touch