> Moreover, really old equipment is still in use and new equipment isn't likely to be 'designed for autoprotocol' for a while. How do you think managing instrument communication is going to work?
This is obviously a big issue; it's what we spend most of our time on at Transcriptic. (That, and building new hardware when it makes sense.) Only a few devices are designed for being controlled by 3rd party software and even fewer are designed for real automation like motorized lids for sample loading. Internally we have a layer that handles all of the device communication, but we haven't open sourced that and it wouldn't make sense without the rest of our infrastructure anyway: not something easy to just pick up on part of.
This is kind of outside the scope of Autoprotocol. I think that in reality there will be three big uses of it right now:
- generating eg a PDF to take into the lab
- using it for more semantic information about the methods being used in conjunction with analysis of data you get from running stuff in lab
- running experiments on Transcriptic
In terms of automating communication and data capture in your own lab, I think Riffyn's doing the most interesting work here and it will be interesting to see what they come out with.
This is obviously a big issue; it's what we spend most of our time on at Transcriptic. (That, and building new hardware when it makes sense.) Only a few devices are designed for being controlled by 3rd party software and even fewer are designed for real automation like motorized lids for sample loading. Internally we have a layer that handles all of the device communication, but we haven't open sourced that and it wouldn't make sense without the rest of our infrastructure anyway: not something easy to just pick up on part of.
This is kind of outside the scope of Autoprotocol. I think that in reality there will be three big uses of it right now:
- generating eg a PDF to take into the lab - using it for more semantic information about the methods being used in conjunction with analysis of data you get from running stuff in lab - running experiments on Transcriptic
In terms of automating communication and data capture in your own lab, I think Riffyn's doing the most interesting work here and it will be interesting to see what they come out with.