BioRAPTR

The BioRAPTR is a non-contact dispenser. Beckman Coulter’s own glossary defines the name as “Bio RAPid Transfer Robot” and describes it as a family of non-contact dispensers for low-volume dispensing operations, and that glossary entry is now the only mention of the instrument on Beckman Coulter’s site — there is no current BioRAPTR product page, datasheet or specification sheet. Beckman Coulter’s current listed non-contact liquid handlers are the Echo acoustic liquid handler series, which is a different technology and is not presented by Beckman Coulter as a BioRAPTR replacement.

Revolution drives BioRAPTR units that are already installed. The instrument’s own control software stays in charge of what a dispense actually does; Revolution triggers a named protocol and the tip wash, and takes care of the plate handover.

At a glance

Manufacturer status	No current product page or published specification on the manufacturer’s site; only a glossary definition
Instrument software	The vendor BioRAPTR application must be installed on the instrument PC — the driver initialises against it and cannot run without it
Revolution control	Run a dispense protocol by file name against a named plate type; wash selected tips
Connection	HTTP, to a separate BioRAPTR host service on the instrument PC

Specifications

Beckman Coulter does not publish specifications for the BioRAPTR. Channel count, volume range and supported plate densities are therefore not documented here — this page carries no performance figures rather than figures we cannot source from the manufacturer. If you need those numbers for a system design, take them from the instrument’s own documentation or from Beckman Coulter directly.

Supported methods

Two operations are exposed to a schedule.

• Run protocol — dispense using a protocol file, named by protocolFileName, against a plateType that must match a plate type the instrument knows. delidFirst controls whether the lid is removed before dispensing and useEvapWells selects evaporation-well handling. timeout is the schedule’s watchdog on the dispense; left at its default of Never the driver applies a 1200-second watchdog instead, so a wedged dispense still fails the step rather than stalling the schedule for ever
• Wash — flush the fluid path. tip1 to tip4 select which tips take part, primeVolumeML is the prime volume in millilitres, and dispenseVolumeUL and numberOfDispenses set the volume per dispense in microlitres and how many dispenses to make. Also takes a timeout

The plate type is a parameter of the dispense, not of the device, so a schedule that dispenses into more than one labware type passes a different plateType per step and needs no reconfiguration between them.

Integration

The driver does not talk to the vendor library in-process. The BioRAPTR software is driven by a separate host service on the instrument PC, and Revolution connects to that service over HTTP. That boundary matters in practice: the vendor interop and the stray-process cleanup that comes with it live in the host, so a fault in the instrument software does not take the scheduler down with it. Initialisation starts a watchdog, terminates any BioRAPTR wrapper processes left behind by a previous run, initialises the instrument and moves it to the load position, so a unit left in an unknown state after a crash is recovered on the next initialise rather than by hand.

Because Revolution owns the plate handover, the load position is reached as part of initialisation and dispensing is expected to happen with the plate presented by a robot rather than placed by an operator.

Prerequisites

• The vendor BioRAPTR application must be installed on the instrument PC. The driver initialises the instrument against its installation directory, so a machine without it cannot be brought online.
• The BioRAPTR host service must be running before the device is initialised in Revolution, and must stay running for as long as Revolution needs the instrument.
• Protocols are authored in the vendor software. Revolution refers to them by file name, so the protocol has to exist on the instrument PC before a schedule that names it can run.

Device configuration

Property	Purpose
URL	Address of the BioRAPTR host service. Each instrument has its own host, so on a system with more than one BioRAPTR each device’s URL must point at the matching host

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