The Automated Lab

Your lab spent months scoping, designing, deploying, and testing a new workcell. It runs beautifully and _hopefully_ it'll take the pressure off your capacity constraints. A year later, that workcell gathers dust. Let's talk about the orphaned equipment problem.
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colorful text that reads "hello world"

Why is it so hard to write a good device driver? It turns out, the answer is complicated. I spoke to automation software engineer @rhwlo.bsky.social to learn more about the art of writing drivers, and why it’s so challenging to get right.

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Colorful wavy text reading, "Hello World"

This week we're publishing a long-overdue article on device drivers. If you've ever used a workcell or other integrated #labautomation system, you've relied on device drivers to communicate data to and from lab instruments.
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a colorful monolayer of cells

Guest author @escaautomation.bsky.social lends us his expertise with an automation engineer's guide to cell culture. Read all about it at The Automated Lab.
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a glowy, double-stranded DNA molecule

What exactly is exactly is an AI Scientist? Not to be confused with the human scientists studying AI, AI Scientists are an umbrella term for the AI and ML-powered tools attempting to automate the scientific process. Read more in our overview! theautomatedlab.com/article.html...

It's a 24 panel illustration, with a rotor (circle) with 24 open circles. For each increment from 1 to 24, an additional circle is filled with blue or pink, in ways that create a symmetrical axis of mass, allowing the rotor to be balanced when rotating at high speeds. The pinks generally show the odd numbers (divisible by 3) while the blues are the paired (divisible by 2) I think?

Weird intersection of math & centrifuge balancing:
Visual proof that it's possible to balance a 24-position centrifuge rotor for any number of equally-filled tubes EXCEPT 1 and 23.

Some of these are anxiety-inducing, though.

(🧑‍🎨: aliyoh, labrats subreddit)

A gloved hand passes a microplate to a lab robot.

What if there was a breadboard for lab instruments and #labautomation? Science Jubilee may be just that. Read our overview of this low-cost, open source lab automation platform that has evolved from the Maker community! theautomatedlab.com/article.html...

It was a real honor to join Nabil on Discovery Engines to talk #labautomation!

Colorful image of a robot holding a microplate

The Lab Automation Device Landscape: Automation is transforming the way researchers and technicians carry out repetitive tasks from pipetting to data collection. We’ve written before about #labrobots, software, and #liquidhandlers, but what about everything else?
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This week on TAL: How to Automate an R&D Lab
There is an assumption in lab automation that a process has to be locked down before it can be automated. So how does automation fit into an R&D lab?
theautomatedlab.com/article.html...

A colorful, distorted image of the bottom of a 384-well microplate

Labware! The foundation of lab work, both automated and otherwise. How do the nitty gritty details of a #microplate impact an #automated workflow? Read up on #labautomation fundamentals at The Automated Lab.
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A CSV file printed on paper in a warped manner

This week we're publishing a primer on #platemaps and #worklists: a concept so essential to #labautomation that experienced engineers have probably forgotten when and how they learned about them!

theautomatedlab.com/article.html...

Self-driving laboratories, advanced immunotherapies and five more technologies to watch in 2025 Sustainability and artificial intelligence dominate our seventh annual round-up of exciting innovations.

Excellent to see self-driving laboratories as one of the technologies to watch in 2025: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

person handing a 96-well microplate to a robot

Have you or a loved one automated a lab? It may be more common than you think! This week we're looking at some common #labautomation journeys and their tradeoffs so that you can plan for challenges before they arrive!

theautomatedlab.com/article.html...

November Update | The Automated Lab Get more from The Automated Lab on Patreon

You can read a more detailed update on our Patreon, which we are slowly figuring out how to use properly. :) You can join our community for free, or support us for as little as $5/month and get a cool robot sticker as a thank you! www.patreon.com/posts/novemb...

Hello lab automators, it's been a moment since we checked in! We won't be publishing any new articles in December, as we are busy spinning up some truly special projects for 2025. No spoilers yet, but we're looking forward to forging new paths for #openaccess lab automation. Exciting things to come!

isometric, escher-esque illustration of a chaotically automated lab and a very lost researcher

This week, we've published a very special visual tour of the mighty #workcell. Fans of #labautomation, #scienceillustration, and #GSAP animation take a look!
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Designing Experiments for Automated Labs! We publish practical information about lab automation for scientists and engineers. This piece focuses on how researchers can approach large-scale experimentation in highly automated wetlabs theautomatedlab.com/article.html...

Career ladders take time and thought to develop, and it’s rare to find an automation expert who also knows how to define a generalizable career path. That’s why we’re publishing this career ladder designed by lab automation engineers for lab automation engineers.
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This kind of website is a massive source of inspiration for TAL. Now more than ever we need folks sharing their expertise beyond the confines of any particular social platform. The more niche, the better 🙏

Get more from The Automated Lab on Patreon an education hub for lab automation professionals and enthusiast

Much lies ahead for this project, and I am deeply excited for what comes next. Please check us out at theautomatedlab.com or be a hero and support us at www.patreon.com/c/theautomat...

though I hope it inspires the next generation of technology to improve upon the last.

The Automated Lab is a collection of educational resources for those who are new to the world of lab automation. It is intended primarily as a practical guide for a diverse set of people who work in and around automated laboratories,

Only in the last few years have we started to address this issue as a professional community, and I find myself at the right intersection of experience, arrogance, and unemployment to contribute to our small but growing pile of communal knowledge.

Many automation engineers work on small teams with strong but sparse expertise, leaving them to figure out their own career development. Or perhaps they will leave the field in favor of a career path with clearer growth opportunities.

But a lab automation engineer must tinker with expensive equipment and reagents on the job to develop basic skills.

A software engineer has an internet full of free educational resources and a biologist has as many textbooks and youtube explainers. A mechanical or electrical engineer may attend school at the vocational, undergraduate, or graduate level.

Our field is tricky in that we work almost entirely with immature, expensive, and highly proprietary technology.

Lab automation is a field filled with clever people of many backgrounds, and I have yet to meet one who intended to end up here. We encounter the same frustrating behavior from the same model of plate peeler (you know the one!), and yet we have few ways to share our expertise.

"Hello World" typography poster

If you're a fan of lab robots, #opensource and #openinformation projects, or vibrant #scienceillustration consider following! This is The Automated Lab, a free education and resource hub for people who work in and around automated labs.