Opentrons raises $10M for scientists to automate lab experiments with robotics
1–10 of 29 posts
Re: Opentrons raises $10M for scientists to automate lab experiments with robotics
#2And we're hiring! Come work at the company democratizing sophisticated biotech tools with open-source lab robots https://opentrons.com/jobs
Re: Opentrons raises $10M for scientists to automate lab experiments with robotics
#3For those who are un-aware of laboratory automation, this is not a new industry. There are MANY automated liquid handlers on the market. Beckman, Eppendorf, Hamilton, and Tecan are the larger names.
What's new is the way Opentrons is offering value: thru low-cost hardware and open-source software. With the OT2 they ditched the use of a manual pipetters with dedicated 8 and 1 channel pipetters (a good move). The software looks more polished... but not caught up the industry yet. Definitely catering to the DIY crowd.
The larger, highly capable robotic liquid handlers cost in the $100-500k range (examples: https://www.beckman.com/liquid-handlers, https://www.hamiltoncompany.com/products/automated-liquid-ha..., https://lifesciences.tecan.com/products/liquid_handling_and_...).
This little guy is the smallest of the batch, but interesting to keep an eye on.
Re: Opentrons raises $10M for scientists to automate lab experiments with robotics
#4congrats!
Re: Opentrons raises $10M for scientists to automate lab experiments with robotics
#5And we're hiring! Come work at the company democratizing sophisticated biotech tools with open-source lab robots https://opentrons.com/jobs
Will/have you open source the hardware for OT2 like you did for OT1 (https://github.com/Opentrons/otone_hardware)?
Re: Opentrons raises $10M for scientists to automate lab experiments with robotics
#6For those who are un-aware of laboratory automation, this is not a new industry. There are MANY automated liquid handlers on the market. Beckman, Eppendorf, Hamilton, and Tecan are the larger names. What's new is the way Opentrons is offering value: thru low-cost hardware and open-source software. With the OT2 they ditched the use of a manual pipetters with dedicated 8 and 1 channel pipetters (a good move). The softw…
> The software looks more polished... but not caught up the industry yet.
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.
Re: Opentrons raises $10M for scientists to automate lab experiments with robotics
#7Congrats! I want a OT-2! When does it ship? Also, when's the 96-well plate head coming?
Re: Opentrons raises $10M for scientists to automate lab experiments with robotics
#8For those who are un-aware of laboratory automation, this is not a new industry. There are MANY automated liquid handlers on the market. Beckman, Eppendorf, Hamilton, and Tecan are the larger names. What's new is the way Opentrons is offering value: thru low-cost hardware and open-source software. With the OT2 they ditched the use of a manual pipetters with dedicated 8 and 1 channel pipetters (a good move). The softw…
> The software looks more polished... but not caught up the industry yet. 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 mo…
My god I couldn't agree more. I used a Tecan liquid handler for years and wow did I hate it. It was very easy to fuck something up or make a change in the software without an error being thrown or the user being notified; the GUI was absolutely a black box to new users and I had to write my own manual to walk labmates through what to do to run known protocols; there was 0 attempt at optimizing movements to save time; the machine required manual calibration every single time it was used in a shared environment to make sure that someone hadn't changed tip alignment, plate holder position, or plate specs manually or accidentally by crashing a tip; it was trivially easy to break the arm or tips if you weren't paying attention and they cost a fortune to replace; there was no version control etc etc.
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.
Re: Opentrons raises $10M for scientists to automate lab experiments with robotics
#9For those who are un-aware of laboratory automation, this is not a new industry. There are MANY automated liquid handlers on the market. Beckman, Eppendorf, Hamilton, and Tecan are the larger names. What's new is the way Opentrons is offering value: thru low-cost hardware and open-source software. With the OT2 they ditched the use of a manual pipetters with dedicated 8 and 1 channel pipetters (a good move). The softw…
> The software looks more polished... but not caught up the industry yet. 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 mo…
A lot of software in science and engineering R&D seems pretty bad. Even the firmware/user interfaces to some instruments are terrible, like ease of operation is an afterthought.
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.
Re: Opentrons raises $10M for scientists to automate lab experiments with robotics
#10And we're hiring! Come work at the company democratizing sophisticated biotech tools with open-source lab robots https://opentrons.com/jobs
Will/have you open source the hardware for OT2 like you did for OT1 ( https://github.com/Opentrons/otone_hardware )?
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...