Running Schedules

Starting A Schedule#

Schedules can be run by clicking on the menu, Schedules | Run OR by use of the “run schedule” toolbar button which has the following icon:

When the “run schedule” button is clicked the following dialog will show which allows selection of a schedule and startup parameters.

The schedule selection/start dialog allows the user to enter the following data:

• Schedule name: the name of the schedule to be run. The currently selected schedule is shown in the preview pane
• Schedule thread count: note that if the chosen schedule only handles one piece of labware such as a plate, then thread count can be thought of to be equal to “plate count”
• Notes: allows the user to enter any textual notes associated with this run
• Start time: allows the user to select a time for the schedule to start. This can be “Now”, a given date and time, or either the start or end of a currently running schedule thread to allow the start of this thread to wait until another schedule thread has either just started or just ended.

Active Schedules View#

The Active Schedules view can be found under the System tab as shown in the following screen shot. This tab shows an overview of the active and completed schedules. It shows the state of each schedule, such as Running, Paused, Completed, Aborted etc and also how many child threads are complete/active etc. From this tab the user can pause/resume/abort schedules together with a range of other useful operations.

The toolbar contains the following buttons:

Toggles pause/resume for a running schedule

Pause all active schedules

Resume all active schedules

Abort all active schedules

Abort selected schedule

Toggles suspend/resume on child thread starting. Often schedules are written to run a set of labware objects (plates maybe) where each labware object runs in its own schedule thread. Hence this button can be considered to be “pause plate input”. If required “child thread starting” can be automatically suspended for a given schedule if an error is encountered.

Aborts “child thread starting”.

Allows the user to modify the schedule thread count. This can be useful if additional plates are required to be run on a currently running assay. The user can populate the new plates via the Storage Manager in the appropriate location and then increase the schedule thread count as required to run the additional plates.

Allows the user to delete any labware in the system for the selected schedule. Only enabled if the selected schedule is no longer active, IE it is completed or aborted and hence not running.

Will remove the selected schedule from the Active Schedules list. Users can only remove inactive schedules.

Will remove all inactive schedules from the list.

Device Initialisation#

Before use, a device must be initialized. Initializing a device will connect the Revolution software/driver to the physical device and cause it to perform any home movements to occur.

Devices can be initialized and uninitialised by use of the following buttons from the main toolbar in Revolution:

Clicking on either button will bring up a dialog to allow the user to select which devices should be either initialized or uninitialised. A screen shot showing the dialog follows:

The dialog allows the user to select devices by clicking them, selected devices are shown with check marks as can be seen in the example screen shot. If a device is already initialized it will be shown with the initialized icon, as can be seen for the two XPeel devices at the bottom of the list.

Note that devices can also by initialized and uninitialized by schedule operations if this is required. Using this feature can provide a convenient way to ensure all required devices are ready for use at the start of a schedule.

Different instruments can take different amounts of time to initialize and uninitialise. Some will initialize very quickly if the initialize only requires a connection to be made, others, if they are required to move to home sensors and home positions can take tens of seconds to complete. During the initialize process the status is shown on the bottom of the main Revolution window and also on the Devices States tab, as shown highlighted in the following screen shot: