“we shove the poles in the holes”
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Plugged-up manifold ports for a microplate washer.
Short skinny tubes are dispensers, tall fat ones are vacuum.
“Fat” is about 1.5mm.
This is a microplate. Sometimes we use 200/day and each gets 4 to 6 rounds of squirting stuff in and washing.
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If it isn’t rigorously maintained, protein builds up, plugs form, the manifold has to come off for manual cleaning. Warm enzymatic detergent, then shoving a tiny wire into each hole.
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So lots of samples being tested in parallel by robots between manual degunkings
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Feels like it should come with a degunking plate of stiff wires you can shove in all at once
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Alignment is a problem for 96 500 micron thick 3 cm long wires.
A dedicated single wire-poking 5-axis robot with a camera could make short work of it.
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I’m usually triangulating with my two eyes and the probe angled to seat the wire. Might be just a human approach.
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Shouldn’t you have like a minimum-wage high school intern for this sort of lab scut work? Or is it too infrequent to outsource?
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Sporadic, tough to schedule until there’s a lot of scut.
Best to tack hardware maintenance onto the user’s responsibilities. Which I will.
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