Agilent Ambient Storage

Revolution drives three Agilent ambient-temperature plate devices. They are often lumped together, but they are three separate products, three separate Agilent ActiveX controls, and three separate Revolution device classes — nothing is shared between them except the integration pattern.

Device	What it is	Revolution device class
Labware MiniHub	Rotating, random-access labware store with configurable shelf spacing	MiniHub
PlateHub	Twelve-sided plate storage carousel	PlateHub
Microplate Exchanger	Two-pad plate exchange mechanism, used as a handoff between devices	Agilent Plate Exchanger

Of the three, only the Labware MiniHub is a current Agilent catalogue product. The PlateHub and the Microplate Exchanger are older devices that Agilent no longer list on a product page — the PlateHub is documented in Agilent’s BioCel system material, and Agilent publish no current specification for the Microplate Exchanger at all.

At a glance

Temperature	Ambient on all three — none of these devices is environmentally controlled
MiniHub capacity	Up to 64 standard SBS microplates
MiniHub presentation time	Under 5 seconds
PlateHub capacity	12 sides, up to 16 plates or 8 tip boxes per side — up to 192 plates or 96 tip boxes
Revolution control	Rotation to a store position or cassette; plate movement itself goes through Revolution’s Storage Manager and the robot

Specifications

Labware MiniHub

Agilent’s current product, part number G5584AA.

Type	Rotating, random-access microplate storage device
Labware standard	ANSI/SBS 1-2004 compliant labware
Shelf spacing	User-configurable, via stackable spacers
Labware mix	Microplates, reservoirs, deep-well microplates and pipette tip boxes in one carousel
Software	Agilent VWorks Automation Control Software or third-party automation software

The specification that changes how you lay out a method is stackable spacers. Shelf height is adjustable, so one carousel can hold a mix of labware heights — but that also means the 64-plate figure is the standard-microplate case. Add deep-well blocks or tip boxes and the spacers come out of the same vertical budget, so the real capacity is whatever your spacer arrangement leaves. Get the arrangement settled before positions are taught, because changing it changes where every shelf is.

The “shortest route to target position” note is worth planning around too: presentation time is a rotation, so it depends on where the carousel happens to be. Under 5 seconds is Agilent’s figure, not a fixed cost per access.

PlateHub

Agilent’s twelve-sided PlateHub carousel capacity is given above. Agilent also state the PlateHub must be used with the VWorks inventory management system.

That twelve-sided geometry is visible in Revolution: the rotate to cassette operation accepts a cassette number from 1 to 12. Note the off-by-one that the driver handles for you — Revolution’s Storage Manager numbers store locations from 1, the PlateHub numbers its cassettes from 0, and the driver subtracts one on the way out. Cassette numbers you give Revolution are 1-based.

Microplate Exchanger

Agilent publish no current specification for this device, so none is stated here — no capacity, dimensions or timing. What Revolution knows about it is functional: it presents two pads, and the Revolution driver rotates between them, either as an explicit operation or as a movement to a reachable location when the exchanger is used as a slide in a transfer chain. If you are specifying one, confirm its ratings against your own unit’s documentation or talk to us.

Supported methods

The control surface on all three is small, and that is by design rather than by omission. These are stores and handoffs: plate movement is the robot’s job, and the store’s own record of what it holds is kept by Revolution’s Storage Manager, which is the component that tracks which labware occupies which store location. The operations below exist for the cases where a schedule needs to command the mechanism directly — diagnostics, teaching, and pre-positioning.

Labware MiniHub

• Rotate to present location — rotate so that a nominated location number is presented

PlateHub

• Rotate to cassette — rotate to a cassette from 1 to 12
• Rotate to present location — rotate so that a nominated location number is presented

Microplate Exchanger

• Rotate to pad 1
• Rotate to pad 2

Integration

All three follow the same pattern, and it is the same one Revolution uses for other vendor SDKs that cannot safely live in the scheduler process. Each device is an Agilent ActiveX control — AgilentLabwareMiniHubLib, PlateHubLib and MicroplateExchangerActiveXLib respectively. Revolution does not load those controls itself. It runs a separate controller process that hosts the ActiveX control on its own single-threaded-apartment message loop, and the Revolution device connects to that controller over HTTP. An ActiveX fault is then a fault in the controller, not in the scheduler.

Each device also carries a profile name, which is the Agilent profile the controller passes to the control when it initialises. This is the vendor’s own configuration for that unit, and it must exist on the machine hosting the controller.

Prerequisites

• The Agilent control for the device must be installed on the machine that runs the controller process, along with the profile the device is configured with.
• The controller process must be running and reachable at the configured URL before the device is initialised in Revolution. Each device gets its own controller and its own URL.
• Concurrent pre- and post-load calls are disabled on all three devices in the driver: the ActiveX controls are not safe to call re-entrantly, so Revolution serialises them. Expect these devices to be a serialisation point in a busy schedule rather than something the scheduler can overlap.
• Store geometry — shelf or cassette layout, and the pitch between positions — must match the physical unit before positions are taught.

Device configuration

Property	Purpose
ProfileName	Agilent profile the controller initialises the device with
Url	Address of the controller process hosting the ActiveX control
Speed	Microplate Exchanger only — slow, medium or fast, used when the exchanger is driven as a slide transfer device
Pitch Z	MiniHub and PlateHub — vertical pitch between store positions
Horizontal or Vertical RTH	MiniHub and PlateHub — orientation of the store’s positions

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