ODTC and Scheduler Best Practices

Recently had an HRB workcell installed. ODTCs have been a part of almost every workcell I’ve seen in the past few years (that damn COVID). Any best practices that people can share?

Specifically the ODTC seems a bit of a black box. You tell it what to run but there’s seemingly no way to monitor temps as it’s working. Is it really doing what was asked? I’d like to monitor temps to try to speed things up. I tried changing the initialization script such that the lid and block heat during initialization and that worked, but once the temp is reached it just turns them back off.

The lid in particular seems to take forever to heat, so preheating that before its needed would be great. I had an initial method specified to heat the lid but it doesn’t seem to help timing wise, every plate seems to take the same amount of time. I expected the first plate to take longer so it could heat the lid but subsequent plates would be quicker as the lid is preheated. This doesn’t appear to be the case.

I’d be happy to hear anybody’s experience with ODTCs, Cellario or not.

What kind of ODTC are you using?

Inheco ODTC, sorry, I should have made that clear that I was using the trademarked ODTC. :slight_smile:

Just curious but who provided the driver? Did you get that from HRB, SiLA, or build that in-house?

Got it from HRB.

Just wanted to bump this up in case anybody else has an experience with an ODTC that they wanted to share.

I have experience with Inheco’s ODTC but not HRB. Why are you having trouble monitoring temperatures? The native software logs target, actual, and lid temperatures with ~1Hz polling rate. When we run it through Hamilton this data is also spat out in the trace.

We use the Inheco ODTC on the Tecan NGS systems (DreamPrep) and temp monitoring is part of the SILA driver and also the manufacturers software as part of the logging. I sound like your ODTC is faulty if the lid is taking a long while to heat up? Not sure I have seen this problem in the field.

I don’t think the ODTC is faulty, even the software warns that the lid should take longer to heat than the block. I’m really just being antsy I think. :slight_smile:

I gather then that temp monitoring is just in log files? I’ll hunt around and find the appropriate files, I was hoping there’d be a way to monitor the temps in real time.

Thanks both for your input.

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