HighRes Biosolutions MicroSpin Centrifuge Integration

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I opened PR #1047 adding the HighRes Biosolutions MicroSpin centrifuge to pylabrobot. Not merged yet. Review and testing welcome.

The MicroSpin is a 2-bucket automated microplate centrifuge (up to 3000g) controlled over plain TCP/IP, no FTDI or vendor SDK needed. The wire protocol came out of the device’s own list all / help <cmd> / errors / settings introspection commands plus the user manual, then tested end-to-end on the physical device and the mock server I built.

Tested against: firmware MS-1.3.3 (build 5DDA74E3), unit manufactured 10/2015

Firmware quirks I found on this unit

While reverse-engineering and testing, I hit a few machine behaviours that aren’t documented anywhere. The backend wraps them in UserWarnings and recovery helpers, but I’d love to know if other MicroSpin owners see them too:

  • Low-G hang (g < 30). At very low G the spindle-stopped sensor sometimes fails to latch at end of spin. status after the spin never returns, every subsequent command times out, only fix I found was sending abort, clearbuttonabort, waiting for a few minutes to let it spin down and then running another status command.
  • Slow deceleration (decel < 0.40). spin 1000 100 20 10 (decel = 20 %) on our unit took ~7 minutes to fully stop. Functional but very slow.
  • Possible firmware hang (decel < 0.20). spin 1000 100 10 10 (decel = 10 %) ran for >30 minutes without ever reporting spin-down. Had to abort similar to the low G case mentioned above.
  • ABORTED! is a third terminator. Commands cancelled by abort (and new motion commands issued while the abort latch is set) return ACK! then ABORTED!, not OK! or ERROR!. The backend handles this; mentioning in case anyone else is writing a protocol parser.
  • /rw mount fails at boot 11x. The embedded Technologic Systems SBC shows this on every power-on, likely flash wear from dirty shutdowns (there’s no soft-shutdown command, you flip the back-panel switch). Doesn’t break anything but the errors persist on the device’s error stack.
  • Homing after power-cycle is mandatory but not stated in the manual anywhere I can find. Empirically hss returns not homed after every power-on and motion commands fail until home is issued.

If you have a MicroSpin and a few minutes, give the branch a spin and let me know how it goes. Especially curious whether the decel thresholds match your unit, whether you also see the /rw boot errors, and what your firmware reports. A different firmware revision would tell me whether these are hardware-specific or firmware-family quirks.

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