LiCONiC Incubators

The LiCONiC StoreX STX line is LiCONiC’s family of carousel-based automated incubators for robotic integration. Mechanically they are close relatives of the ambient LiCONiC LPX220 hotel, and Revolution drives them with the same driver — the difference is climate. An STX unit is a sealed, gassed, temperature- and humidity-controlled chamber, and Revolution adds two things on top of the plate handling it shares with the LPX: setpoint operations for temperature and CO₂, and continuous monitoring of what the chamber is actually doing.

The STX device classes are not published in Revolution’s device catalogue today, so an STX cannot be added to a system from the web interface the way the LPX220 can. The driver below is complete enough to commission against; getting a specific STX into a system is a conversation rather than a driver written from scratch.

At a glance

Models in the line	STX44, STX56, STX66, STX110, STX140, STX220, STX280, STX500, STX1000
Capacity	44 MTP (STX44) up to 1060 MTP (STX1000, single-deck 1200 mm stackers)
Line temperature span	LiCONiC quotes −30 °C to 200 °C across the line; each model’s published climate options are narrower
Labware	Microtiter plates, deep-well plates, culture flasks, petri dishes, bioreactor tubes
Interface	RS232 (STX44); LiCONiC also list a UCI Universal Communication Interface option on the STX220
Revolution control	Set target temperature, set target CO₂ level, plate import/export and pick/place, self-scan inventory, shake and rock, initialise and reset

Specifications

LiCONiC publishes climate options as a table of types rather than one continuous range. A unit is ordered as one type, and the type fixes what temperature and humidity it can hold — you cannot turn an STX220-DF deep freezer into an incubator later. These are LiCONiC’s figures for the STX110 and STX44 (2024 flyers):

Type	Temperature	Humidity	Description
IC	33–50 °C, or 33–70 °C	max. 95%, or 70–95%	Incubator
HC	04–25 °C	max. 90%	Humid cooler
DC2	04–25 °C	04–50%	Dry storage
HR	04–50 °C, or 04–70 °C	85–95%, or 70–95%	Humid wide range
DR2	04–50 °C, or 04–70 °C	02–50%	Dry wide range
AR	04–50 °C, or 04–70 °C	15–95%	Humidity controlled
DF	−20–0 °C	02–45%	Deep freezer
DH	04–50 °C, or 04–70 °C	2–30%, or 70–95%	Dry humid
NC	—	—	No climate

LiCONiC attach an explicit caveat to that table: the climate information is “of indicative nature only”, humidity depends on the temperature setting, and all temperature and humidity setpoints must be specified at order time. For the AR type that is a mandatory request. This matters before you write a method, not after: a unit ordered against the wrong setpoints will not reach the ones your schedule asks for.

Capacity depends on plate height, not model alone

LiCONiC publishes capacity as a function of plate height rather than one number per model. The headline count that gives a model its name — “STX220” — is the 17 mm MTP figure; move to deep-well blocks, 1536-well plates or disposable tip boxes and the same unit holds well under half that, because taller labware packs fewer to a tower. LiCONiC note an overheight kit is required above 60 mm on the STX44 and STX110, and a disposal-tips upgrade kit up to 100 mm on the STX220. For an exact count at a specific plate height, check LiCONiC’s datasheet for your model rather than assuming the model number is a plate count for anything other than a standard MTP.

Access times

LiCONiC’s specification page for the STX220-SA gives:

Mean access time	19.3 s
Mean load time	15.1 s
Mean unload time	12.4 s

Note that this is the opposite asymmetry to the LPX220 hotel, where LiCONiC publish unload as slower than load. If you are sizing a schedule against an STX220, use the STX220 numbers — the two product lines do not behave the same way even though Revolution drives them through one driver.

Climate options and gassing

CO₂, N₂ and O₂ are ordered options, not standard fittings: LiCONiC list “Fast CO₂”, “Fast N₂”, “Fast O₂” and their “Additional” equivalents as separate order numbers on the STX44, STX110 and STX220. LiCONiC do not publish a CO₂ or O₂ concentration range for these units, so none is stated here. Other options that change what a schedule can do include a barcode reader (with plate-presence sensor), a linear shaker (STX220: amplitude 1–100 mm, 12–300 rpm), steam injection, a side or mirrored gate, and iMotion / fast access for time-critical applications.

Supported methods

The plate-handling surface is the LiCONiC driver’s, shared with the LPX220. The climate operations below are the ones that only exist on the incubator device classes.

Climate

• Set target temperature — takes a temperature
• Set target CO₂ level — takes a percentage

Both are write-only from a schedule. There is no read-back operation, so a method cannot assert “the chamber is at 37 °C” before it commits cells. What the driver does instead is monitor continuously — see Climate monitoring below — and raise an alarm rather than answer a question. Design methods accordingly: set the setpoint at commissioning or at the start of a campaign, and let the monitoring catch drift, rather than setting and immediately proceeding.

Plate movement

• Import plate / Export plate — take a plate into a tower and position, or deliver one out
• Pick plate — pick a plate to the shuttle and hold it there
• Place plate — place a plate already on the shuttle into a tower and position

All four take a TowerId and a Position, and all four are documented in the driver as low-level commands that bypass Revolution’s Storage Manager and will not update it. That is the single most important thing to know about them. Storage Manager is Revolution’s own record of which labware sits in which store location; drive a plate in with Import plate and Revolution’s inventory is now wrong until something corrects it.

Inventory

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

A self-scan is what corrects the inventory after manual loading, or after the low-level plate movements above. Where a barcode reader is fitted the scan reads barcodes; where one is not, the driver falls back to detecting plate presence and applies the device’s configured Default Labware Type to whatever it finds.

Shaking and rocking

• Start shake — takes a TowerId and a ShakeSpeedRPM
• Stop shake — takes a TowerId
• Start rock — takes a TowerId, a tilt, and two time periods in seconds
• Stop rock — takes a TowerId
• Stop all shake and rock

These carry warnings in the driver itself, and they are honest ones. LiCONiC firmware is recorded as buggy around shake and rock: the rock tilt angle may be ignored, large time values can delay the start, and it can be impossible to turn a single tower on or off independently. Stop all shake and rock exists specifically to force the unit back to a known state when the per-tower calls have not taken effect.

Housekeeping

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

Integration

Prerequisites

• LiCONiC’s own library must be installed on the Revolution host. The driver does not speak the serial protocol directly; it calls LiCONiC’s STXLib DLL, selecting the 64-bit or 32-bit build to match the process. Without that library the device cannot be initialised.
• The unit must be cabled and its COM port known — the driver takes the port number from the device’s configured COM port settings and hands it to the LiCONiC library.
• Where a barcode reader is fitted, its COM port is configured separately.
• Climate setpoints should be reached before labware goes in. There is no read-back operation to gate on, so allow settling time explicitly in the schedule.
• Run initialise hardware before the first plate movement, and a self-scan after any manual loading or any low-level import/export.

Climate monitoring

Independently of the schedule, the driver polls the unit’s status every 2 seconds and records a climate sample — target and current temperature, target and current CO₂, current humidity, and the unit’s error flag and error code — every minute by default. Samples go to a MongoDB collection where one is configured, and fall back to the driver’s log file where one is not.

On top of that it runs two alarms. The temperature alarm band is expressed as a percentage of the target temperature (default: 10% low, 20% high), and the CO₂ band as absolute percentages (default: 0% low, 10% high). A reading outside its band must persist for the alarm grace period (default 5 minutes) before it raises — so a transient dip while the door is open does not cry wolf, but a failing gas supply does.

Humidity is recorded but not controlled from Revolution: there is a current-humidity reading in every sample and no humidity setpoint operation.

Device configuration

Property	Purpose
COM Port Settings	Serial port and line settings; the port number is passed to the LiCONiC library
BarCodeComPort	Serial port for the barcode reader, where fitted
Default Labware Type	Labware assumed for positions found occupied during a self-scan on a unit with no barcode reader
HighTemperatureAlarmThreshold / LowTemperatureAlarmThreshold	Alarm band, as a percentage of the target temperature
HighCO2AlarmThreshold / LowCO2AlarmThreshold	CO₂ alarm band, as absolute percentages
AlarmGracePeriod	How long a reading must stay out of band before it alarms

STX280

Revolution carries a dedicated device class for the STX280 on top of the generic incubator class. On initialisation it does two extra things: it issues a stop all shake and rock to clear any shake or rock state the unit powered on with, and it applies a fixed cassette configuration — towers 1 and 2 as 10 levels at 46 mm pitch, towers 3 and 4 as 17 levels at 30 mm pitch. That layout was commissioned for a specific installation. If your STX280’s cassettes are arranged differently, this class will address the wrong levels, and the configuration needs changing to match your unit.

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