One really simple tool I like to use in PyHamilton is a tip tracking class. The idea is that unlike interacting with wells, you usually don’t care exactly which tips you’re picking up, you just need the right number of unused tips to execute a particular command.
With this in mind, we can write a class that serves us a list of tips that we can pick up to execute a command, and automatically updates the number of tips so that the next time we fetch tips, we fetch from an updated index.
class TipRack:
'''
This class automatically tracks the tips remaining in a
rack and lets the user fetch a specified number of tips
'''
def __init__(self, rack):
'''
The class is initialized by referencing a
PyHamilton Tip96 or Tip384 object
'''
self.rack = rack
self.starting_tips = rack._num_items
self.remaining_tips = rack._num_items
def get_tips(self, num_tips):
'''
This method fetches a specified number of tips
and updates the object state to subtract those
tips
'''
current_tip = self.starting_tips - self.remaining_tips
tips_list = [(self.rack, tip) for tip in range(current_tip, current_tip + num_tips)]
self.remaining_tips -= num_tips
return tips_list
def get_tips_seq(self, seq):
num_tips = len([ch for ch in seq.aspirate if ch])
tips = self.get_tips(num_tips)
return tips
lmgr = LayoutManager('assets//deck.lay')
tips = lmgr.assign_unused_resource(ResourceType(Tip96, "drug_a_tips"))
tracked_tips = TipRack(tips)
tracked_tips.get_tips(8)