When starting with the development of the BioPro-software we already expected to slide into a huge undertaking getting all these different components to work together in one framework. The leading idea was to allow a potential experimenter to control the whole machine from his office-desktop without being required in the lab and look through the lenses of a microscope.
Essentially this is what we achieved but we also had partially a hard confrontation with reality:
- Controlling everything from one place is not sufficient; it must be done reliably and with a sufficient performance. Reliability really becomes an issue when the software gets so big that all the details no longer can be remembered by the programmer, with 200.000 lines of code this threshold of software-complexity is already past significantly. Performance is even a bigger problem because many interface are not build as high-speed fast-reaction interfaces. This is especially true for all serial-interfaces (RS-232) and this requires that control commands have to be given in parallel and software-design has to be made such that delays of one part can be masked by delays of another part of the software. Certainly, to make the software as powerful as it could be possible, a lot more of software-development has to be spent and one person alone in the development is by no means sufficient.
- The even harder reality check was not the software as such but the interfacing to the active ongoing chemistry inside the microfluidic structures. Not only the high surface to volume ratio made chemistry hard to predict but also the electrical currents which essentially switched the whole chemical experiment to an electro-chemical experiment. If there are additional phases in the fluids, e.g. oleic-acid combined with normal buffer then the experiments mutate to inhomogeneous multi-phase electro-chemistry with surface interactions. An area where hardly anyone has detailed knowledge about. This problem strongly affects the feedback control and any automatic handling of the chemistry inside the microfluidic system.
- Controlling the machine from the office-desk is possible. It is even possible to do this from an arbitrary point in the world, but it requires a high-bandwidth connection. Furthermore, finding errors, connecting the syringes and "hearing" if something is wrong, still requires a technician to be on-site. But in many cases the dream of a remotely operated Omega-Machine is already reality because all logging can be supervised from remote and experimental data is available at the office-desk in the very moment of being created.
Though many questions remain open concerning the operation of the Omega-Machine, after a suitable training, lab-technicians could and can reliably work with the BioPro-software and can concentrate on the inhomogeneous multi-phase electro-chemistry experiments with surfaces and use this machine as a valuable tool for research.