LiCONiC LPX220

The LiCONiC LPX220 is an ambient plate hotel — open storage for microtiter plates, fed by a robot. It is a different product line from LiCONiC’s STX-series incubators: the LiCONiC Incubators page covers the STX units, which add controlled CO₂, O₂, temperature and humidity. The LPX is a hotel, not an incubator.

At a glance

Capacity	220 microtiter plates
Mean access time	18.4 s
Mean load time	14.7 s
Mean unload time	22.0 s
Integration orientations	Four
Revolution control	Import and export plates, pick and place, self-scan inventory, shake and rock, initialise and reset

Specifications

LiCONiC’s other published figure for the LPX220, beyond what’s in the table above:

Lift mechanism	Spring-balanced, rather than counterweighted

LiCONiC states the spring-balanced lift is used instead of a counterweight to improve speed and reliability, and that the unit can be integrated in four different orientations — which is the specification that matters most when laying out a cell, because it means the hotel’s access face does not dictate the bench layout.

Note the asymmetry in the timings: unloading takes longer than loading (22.0 s against 14.7 s). A schedule that assumes plate movements in and out cost the same will drift.

LiCONiC lists options including a shaker, a barcode reader (BCR), housings, cassettes and transfer stations. Several of the operations below only do something useful when the corresponding option is fitted.

Supported methods

Plate movement

• Import plate / Export plate — take a plate into the hotel, or deliver one out, by tower and position
• Pick plate / Place plate — lower-level plate handling at a tower and position

Inventory

• Start self scan — scan a range of store locations, from a start to an end location
• Start self scan (full) — scan the whole unit

Self-scan is the operation worth knowing about. A hotel that has been loaded by hand does not know what it holds; a self-scan rebuilds the inventory from what is physically present, rather than from what a schedule believes it put there. Scan a range where only part of the unit was touched — a full scan of 220 positions is not something to put on a schedule’s critical path.

There is no barcode operation on this driver. A barcode reader port is configurable, but reading barcodes is not something a method calls.

Shaking and rocking

• Start shake / Stop shake — by tower, with a shake speed in RPM on start
• Start rock / Stop rock — by tower, with a tilt and two time periods in seconds on start
• Stop all shake and rock — stop both, on all towers

These need the shaker option fitted. They also carry a caveat that comes from the instrument rather than from Revolution: LiCONiC’s firmware is known to misbehave around shake and rock. The tilt angle passed to start rock is ignored, long time periods delay the start, and the towers cannot reliably be controlled one at a time. Stop all shake and rock exists specifically to recover from that — if shaking and rocking get into an inconsistent state, it is the way out.

Housekeeping

• Initialise hardware — bring the unit to a known state
• Soft reset / Reset hardware — recover from a fault

Temperature and CO₂ are not controllable here, and there are no operations for them on this device. The LPX is an ambient hotel; see the LiCONiC Incubators page for the STX units that do control an atmosphere.

Integration

Revolution talks to the LPX220 over a serial connection, with the barcode reader on its own port.

Prerequisites

• The unit must be cabled to the Revolution host and its port settings known before the device is initialised.
• Where a barcode reader is fitted, its own COM port must be configured separately — though no method calls the reader.
• Set the default labware type to the plate the hotel normally holds, so plates the driver has no other record of are handled with the right geometry.
• Run initialise hardware before the first plate movement, and a self-scan after any manual loading, so Revolution’s view of the contents matches reality.

Device configuration

Property	Purpose
COM Port Settings	Serial port and line settings for the unit
BarCodeComPort	Serial port for the barcode reader, where fitted
Default Labware Type	Labware type assumed for plates the driver has no other record of

If you need more of this instrument driven from a schedule, get in touch — the driver is extended on demand.