Progression of the Project

Where are we?

We have completed our project. We have made all of the decisions to optimize our prototype and we have completed testingfor calibration and accuracy. 

What have we done?

We have conducted an extensive technology review to obtain a good foundational knowledge of our design and conducted an analysis of potential solutions to create a finalized design that our team will create next semester. 

Our team completed a 3-D scan of the current pipette utilized to assist in the creation of a model to begin our modifications and will build upon this preliminary model using Solidworks.

Our team has modeled a physical prototype out of cardboard, tape, and tubing for initial design modeling.

We have polished a carboard prototype by modeling it in solidworks and 3-D printing it iteratively with design edits to create a more and more effective prototype.

What decisions did we make?

We made four major decisions: what robot to use, what pipette to use, what pipette tips to use, and how to integrate software. As for the robot, we elected to modify the OT-2 from Opentrons. As for the pipette, we elected to modify the existing pipette for the OT-2 so that its height allows for NMR tubes. As of the pipette we elected stainless steel as the material in a needle shape so that it can fill the thin NMR tubes from the bottom up. As for the software integration, we elected to manually code Python as that allows for the most customization. 

How did we present our final design?

We presented our final design as the finalized prototype. Since we are making something tangible and small enough to fit on lab desks, we were to have a prototype present and videos of the operation of our prototype on the Opentron robot at our final presentations. This allowed us to highlight the work we have done to our audience in a digestible manner with visual aids to assist in explaining the functionality of our design.