PLR Fluent + Veya team

General
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As discussed previously (1, 2) we are working with Tecan on bringing the Fluent and Veya robots to PLR. This will be a private working group while we work with them on a public release of some of their code it will rely on, which is hopefully very soon.

I had claude write a PLR wrapper for it that works in their simulator, which is pretty advanced. But I’m hoping to assemble a team to make it work in reality. As mentioned previously, I do not have Fluent hardware myself, but will be helping with development in every way I can. The PLR driver would bypass fluent control and just talk to the robot through the api, on a low level.

If you want to join this working group, please comment or DM. We are having the first meeting next week to organize development.

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Hi Rick. I would like to join. From Tecan side we are happy to support integrations and provide/extend API access

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@rickwierenga please could I be added to the working group? I’m hoping to meet Camillo soon to discuss this, but I work at Cambridge Consultants where I operate two Fluent 1080s and I’m keen to know how I can contribute to this PLR development

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dm’d

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Want to revive this thread as we are very interested. Making Tecan Fluent 100% in python would be huge!

We have liquid FCA Tecan Fluents.

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yes it would be massive

I recommend sharing as much as you can in this thread/else on the public forum :slight_smile:

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I was added to the MapLinx team but believe I am blocked due to no liquid FCA support or Techrome shuttle support. We bought Tecans for Techrome as it is the one thing Hamiltons cannot do and is our main use case.

My initial question for the Tecan team; is the air FCA command the same for a liquid FCA?

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We are working on supporting more Fluent modules with MapLinx but at the moment liquidFCA and TeChrom are only supported via FluentControl drivers. You could use SLKS99/PyFluent but will need to have FluentControl installed and a base worktable defined.

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Hi @mhuber ,

Thanks for the response! Bummer, I think most of us that are interested in getting the Tecan running PLR are blocked due to no support for the MCA, Liquid FCA, or TeChrome module.

I understand that the Fluent operates quite differently than other robots on the market; where the PC calculates the motion profiles for the robot.

If it helps your case Opentrons publishes its motor-level motion planner as open source (Apache-2.0): opentrons/hardware/opentrons_hardware/hardware_control/motion_planning at 1848edb78a51b3e11782589efbb05892e16aec4a · Opentrons/opentrons · GitHub

So far they’ve only sold more robots after this, look at all the small startups that have integrated LLM’s to drive their labs. This precedent seems advantageous in the era of AI. We would all love to buy more instruments that can either be programmed in tandem with LLM’s or controlled via Anthropic’s MHS standard in the future. Essentially I am saying people will throw money at lab automation instruments that are AI enabled and only having to install one package, PLR, to communicate with all devices seems like the way to go!

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