OpenTrons: Open Source Robotic Liquid Handling

Wait a minute - are you actually depressing the top pipettor here? (I was about to say "manually", but that doesn't sound right). That can't be too reproducible. And how is the pipettor attached?

Why not use an electronic pipet that does all of that for you? I remember using a digital pipettor years ago that was already programmable for just this type of application (eppendorf maybe?).

That's really the issue that needs to be front and center - how reproducible is this machine. For any lab that could use one of these, that is always the primary concern. What I'd like to see is something like a dye test where you diluted a dye into each well on a 96 well plate and then used a plate reader to determine how precise you are.

The second consideration is speed. How fast can this possibly be? I've used a liquid handling robot before that "only" had a 4-channel head, and it was slow enough that I eventually gave up and set the plates up by hand with an 8-channel pipet. Precision is the main concern, but speed is a close second. If you want to replace manual pipetting, you better be faster than a grad student.

And if a lab is able to use automation, the P1000 in the front page video is not going to be what they need. There are few applications where you'll want to pipet 200-1000ul in an automated manner - there are many more applications for 1-10ul. So I'd like to see more information on what pipettors are supported, and how do you change them?

As someone below mentioned - there is just too much missing information on the page. I had to resize my browser just to see the full video, which answered a couple of questions, but not all.

How many labs are currently using your machine, and for how many are these just toys to play with vs production machines? Meaning - if a lab is setup to properly test the machine, they probably have a few other liquid handlers in place. How many of their protocols can they transfer to the OT-One? And would any of them choose this over a more advanced machine?

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

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

The words you picked out of context were not aimed at that OP's site.

Profanity is not equivalent to lack of civility. Some of the most well-spoken people have been some of the most profane and brutal in human history. For example, I wonder if Hitler ever cursed in his speeches.

Anyhow, the flowery language was intended to impress upon the owner of this website that there's an urgent need to fix this website because, well, it won't sell very much as it is.

Too many entrepreneurs think selling is done by showing what you make (hardware, software, website). No, it isn't.

I was in that camp twenty-five years ago. I thought I knew how to sell the wonderful hardware I worked so hard to develop. To my credit, I had the good sense to give myself an "F" during a self evaluation of my ability to sell. And that was followed by working hand-in-hand with our first resellers for a full year.

We'd go show the hardware to potential customers and they'd let me do the pitch. After the visit we'd stop at Starbucks for a post-mortem. For the first four to six months they often started with "why the FUCK did you say...".

After a year I got to the point where I could sell our products almost without uttering a word about them during sales visits. I graduated.

Anyhow, from a salesmanship perspective this website is terrible. All it is good for is to mimic current trends in web styling, yet, from a sales perspective it will be horribly ineffective.

When you are trying to sell a product being clever, trendy or sexy seldom works. Having a beautiful woman eat a burger half naked on a pickup truck isn't going to make me want to go to that restaurant. It's a spectacle. It has shock value. I'll probably watch it. But it does nothing to position the product in a useful manner, compel me to learn more and consider buying it.

Building a website loaded with cool and trendy crap is having a website loaded with cool and trendy crap. It is NOT building a website that rocks at salesmanship.

Some of the ugliest ads and websites rock at selling. A/B testing often reveals incredible surprises about how people respond to what they see online.

The OP needs to pay a sales consultant to help them redo the entire thing. It won't be trendy, but it will sell.