Opentrons / opentrons

Software for writing protocols and running them on the Opentrons Flex and Opentrons OT-2
https://opentrons.com
Apache License 2.0
419 stars 178 forks source link

feat: Allow aspirating more than the official maximum tip volume #7539

Open SyntaxColoring opened 3 years ago

SyntaxColoring commented 3 years ago

Overview

Officially, Opentrons 200 µL filter tips can only hold 200 µL. If you aspirate any more, you risk the liquid touching the filter.

However, our Applications Engineering and Science teams sometimes find themselves wanting to break past this limit. Depending on liquid viscosity, flow rate, and gantry speed, they've found that those tips can actually hold up to ~235 µL.

To use that extra capacity, they have to deliberately load the tip rack wrongly as an opentrons_96_tiprack_300ul instead of an opentrons_96_filtertiprack_200ul. This is a hacky workaround, and it makes things confusing by presenting the wrong labware in the deck map in the Opentrons App. We should provide a real way to do it.

Acceptance criteria

Possible implementations

mattwelch commented 3 years ago

Not a bug

danolson1 commented 2 years ago

For the non-filter tips, you can extend the volume range even further. The p300 pipette tips can actually hold about 440 ul before the liquid contacts the pipette. The p20 pipette tips hold about 70 ul. So there's a lot of room to allow for volume above the recommended maximum (assuming the pipette piston could accommodate it).