My god I couldn't agree more. I used a Tecan liquid handler for years and wow did I hate it. It was very easy to fuck something up or make a change in the software without an error being thrown or the user being notified; the GUI was absolutely a black box to new users and I had to write my own manual to walk labmates through what to do to run known protocols; there was 0 attempt at optimizing movements to save time; the machine required manual calibration every single time it was used in a shared environment to make sure that someone hadn't changed tip alignment, plate holder position, or plate specs manually or accidentally by crashing a tip; it was trivially easy to break the arm or tips if you weren't paying attention and they cost a fortune to replace; there was no version control etc etc.

Their hardware was also total crap. Both the main pump and tip cleaning pump failed on me two times without any notification being thrown, the arm failed once, tips broke countless times. Our regional Tecan rep was on a first name basis with me for awhile and I wasn't even the owner of the machine.

I almost ended up taking a Tecan engineer certification class just so I could use the equipment as a knowledgeable user. Tecan also wanted to charge me something like 15 grand for an arm and tip solution which would handle 1536 well plates which I was able to replicate with 1 cent worth of plastic shims and a few of their black 10 uL tips -_-

I will absolutely recommend that my lab looks into buying one of these.

This is exactly the pain we are trying to help in the lab -- your story is all too common!

It is crazy to me that we are the first lab automation company to bring best practices of consumer tech UX and engineering to the wet lab, but its true. We're the first to use continuous integration / delivery, Agile development, usability testing, easy APIs / DSLs -- the list goes on. Would love to work with you and restore your faith in what lab automation can be!

We're a distributor to many start ups and biotech companies and it's so refreshing to hear this area being taken on!

A lot of software in science and engineering R&D seems pretty bad. Even the firmware/user interfaces to some instruments are terrible, like ease of operation is an afterthought. Then you have giant turds like LabVIEW by National Instruments who really should know better. I really don't know why it is so popular.

> A lot of software in science and engineering R&D seems pretty bad. Even the firmware/user interfaces to some instruments are terrible, like ease of operation is an afterthought.

nobody shops for a $250k scientific instrument on the basis of the control software, unfortunately. it's all about the machine's resolution or speed or something compared to the competitors.

or even just what you're familiar with from your previous laboratory.

> Then you have giant turds like LabVIEW by National Instruments who really should know better. I really don't know why it is so popular.

they dump a lot of money into undergrad lab/education. or did, anyways. and 20 years ago if you just wanted to pull some one-off analog sensors into a PC for an industrial process (without being an EE), NI hardware/software might very well have been the cheapest/easiest/fastest way to do it.