[DIYbio] Re: Freedom Evo Tecan Troubleshooting - HELP!

Hi diybio community!

I was wondering if anyone out there has experience with the Freedom Evo Tecan Robot. 

We have ours for a few years (>5) and no one has good memories of working with it. And basically, we're just trying to use it to read 96 well plates (between 8 and 12) for 24h.

Everything starts out OK, it runs for about 6h and afterward it just stops working showing messages like "Your run has been stopped" or "Your run was aborted". No red light blinking. No alarm. 

However, if we hit the recover bottom, it re-starts working, as if nothing had happened. If we're really lucky, the run then proceeds until the end, but normally it keeps crashing systematically afterwards.

The only pattern we've been able to detect is that the robot normally stops working when the plate is inside the plate reader.

The technicians from Tecan are now almost part of the lab, because of all the problems we have with the Robot, but they never manage to tell us exactly is the problem. Whatever they do (switch a cable, tweak the software, plug/unplug all machinery) works for a couple of hours but we then go back to the same original problem.

We're just desperate to know if someone else has faced the same problem or if it is a problem with our machine.

I look forward to your feedback.

Best regards and DO GREAT SCIENCE!

Ana