OpenTrons: Open-Sourced Liquid Handling for Wet-Labs

An open-source project is seeking funding on Kickstarter to build a low cost liquid handling robot for small, medium and garage sized laboratories. The project called OpenTrons seeks to create a cheap and easy-to-use liquid handling robot called OT.One that pipettes small amount of liquids faster and without error.

Liquid handling in one of the most common tasks in a wet lab and clinics: it is repetitive, injurious, error-prone and time consuming. The demand for Ever research laboratory needs at least one liquid handling unit per researcher.

Low Cost Automated Liquid Handling

Commercially available automated liquid handling units from Hudson Robotics, Tecan and Sartorius cost upwards of $10,000, making it unaffordable by majority of small laboratories and garage scientists. The OT.One with a Rasberry-pi on-board costs just around $2,000, with open source instructions easily available to assemble one on your own. The basic setup allows attaching a single multichannel or single-channel pipette.   It is up-gradable with OT.MagWash station for magnetic micro-bead washes, a multi-channel micropipette, and on-board camera.

Source: Kickstarter OpenTrons