Is there a chance Tecan could post a link to install evoware (preferably version 2.8) so I can run simulations on my desktop?
Thanks massively,
Stefan
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Is it possible to have both EVO and Fluent software on the same laptop for simulation use?
Yea if you use a VM. I have multiple VM’s on my MacBook. One for each version of Tecan software and another Venus and method Manager
I probably have to do the same thing. I tried to install both locally. EVO stopped working after I installed Fluent. Haven’t had time to figure it out yet.
Yes you will have to
Yes, recommend to install FluentControl on your main and EVOware on your VM.
@luisvillaautomata or @KevMcGuire_Tecan - any tips/tricks on getting Fluent Control to work in a virtual environment? My team is about to try and set up Fluent Control 3.1 with the TeChrom module in AWS AppStream
edit: Fluent Control 3.3
Lots of cores and RAM. Expect a good bit of crashes, newer versions are more stable than older versions. Try to create a VM stripped down as much as possible (there are programs that run powershell to remove Cortana, Live tiles, Xbox, other superficial processes) and load versions fresh with little else on the VM. If you ever start getting errors talking about labware keys and [4ASD5-ASD54-GRE52-FREWF3CV] gibberish, go ahead and restart FC as you’re about to crash within a minute or two. Disable virtual acceleration, and limit your project scope within VMs. Never take a snapshot while the VM is running.
And save often.
Tips/tricks for Dev VM’s or for CI/CD to production?
Something to note: Tecan has specifically outlined which versions of Windows they recommend for their software in order to guarantee better funcationality/stability.
Interesting, you received those errors in the cloud? Or just from something like VMware?
Local VMware. I am not a super user by any means, just tweaked settings till it worked well enough and iterated as I learned more. Those errors tended to pop up when I was messing with carriers and nest positions, but it seemed like they were more often when the VM had been running longer sessions.
i’ve found that VMware WS for FluentControl works best for me,
i am fortunate to have a Lenovo high spec WS with 128GB of RAM with a 32 core Threadripper processor
VM settings > 32 Gb RAM, 8 processors
this actually runs better than FluentControl on a native PC !
even able to run 2-3 VM images simulataneously
Sheesh, how quickly does it start Fluent Control? 2 minutes?
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at most …
even version 1.6 was pretty quick
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Got it! I do all of my development work in a VM on an M1.
I think at the time only Parallels was available so I went with that and it works fine!
However I believe @Eli.Fine is probably more interested in DevOps VM features akin to this,
This is the future for large biomanufacturing companies or diagnostics companies. It’s probably the only way to reliably ensure consistency and reliability across sites.
I know of companies in the past who would host their software and systems on a server but that overhead is awful. Cloud technologies have come a long way and they’re much better, safer and robust than some of the onsite server setups I’ve seen.
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Thats a cool diagram, whats the source?
Thanks for all the tips! We’re just onboarding the Fluent, so at the moment the question was about creating a Developer environment. We’ve been working on getting it installed on top of the base AppStream-WinServer2019-03-29-2023 image on an AWS stream.standard.2xlarge compute instance.
We’ve got something akin to BioSero’s diagram in place for our Dynamic Devices Lynx instruments—Cloud technology has definitely advanced quite rapidly over the last few years, and the benefits for better control over the consistency in computer-controlled operations on-prem (i.e. “in the lab”) are ever increasing. Hopefully a White Paper or presentation forthcoming soon.
For those of you who do use Git (or other) version control with Fluent Control, I’m curious if you know which are the relevant folders to keep under version control (because the contents change during method development). C:\ProgramData\Tecan\VisionX\DataBase seems like it would be required for sure, along with the VisionX\InstrumentConfigurations.
Unfortunately when onboarding a new liquid handler software in the past, I’ve always found it to be a series of unfortunate cases where we realize there’s yet one other folder that contains critical files that should be managed under source control (sometimes in ProgramData, sometimes AppData, sometimes Program Files… 
).