Nanobuilder©

Innovadyne Technologies, Inc. offers Nanobuilder©, an instrument control development environment for Innovadyne dispensing instruments built on the industry standard Microsoft .NET™ architecture. Use of the .NET architecture provides Nanobuilder with extensive data manipulation and data sharing features useful for integration with other software.

Nanobuilder enables you to create protocols or scripts—called sequences—that automate the operation of any Innovadyne liquid handler. A Nanobuilder sequence can control instrument operations ranging in complexity from simple wash operations to highly complicated multiple-plate liquid transfer applications, including protein crystallography. The entire range of operations that can be performed on the instrument can be programmed into Nanobuilder sequences.

The Nanobuilder user interface is simple and intuitive, requiring no programming knowledge, and yet provides all of the power necessary to program complex operations. The Nanobuilder interface is modeled on object-oriented software, using a drag-and-drop process to create instruction step objects in a sequence tree from a master toolbox.

A properties window is used for defining the specifics for the currently selected instruction step in the sequence tree.

Nanobuilder provides a number of programming constructs such as Loop, If-Then, variables, and incrementing. A variable would enable you to set a standard value for the aspirate air gap and use it in several aspirate operations, or give a name to a particular position XYZ triplet and perform a move to that position whenever required. A loop structure could be used to perform a particular dispense operation once for each column in the plate.

Innovadyne provides a separate application called Nanoplayer that enables a user to execute previously created sequences but not to make changes to them. It provides instrument users who have limited technical backgrounds with a non-intimidating environment in which to run sequences, and establishes software control and security.

Integration Options

Nanobuilder facilitates integration with other instruments and software through a variety of mechanisms:

Direct Control of Sequence by Nanobuilder. The Nanobuilder software can be used to both create and play back the sequence to control the instrument. Alternately, the sequence can be developed in Nanobuilder and deployed to workstations where it is run using Nanoplayer.
Instrument Control using External Data. A spreadsheet program, text editor, database, or other software can generate data files that can in turn be used to control the actions of the instrument (in conjunction with a properly constructed Nanobuilder sequence). Data values in the external file can supply position coordinates, dispensing or aspiration volumes, pulse widths—any numeric values that Nanobuilder sequences utilize in any of their steps. This capability to use external data enables the developer to set the parameters for experiments through software, rather than by manually typing in values.
Instrument Control using a Command Line Program. A Nanobuilder sequence can be written to obtain control from the external program such as a robot scheduler that has called it, perform its steps, then return control to the calling program when the sequence is completed. This handoff process is called shelling out. Shell-out capability can be useful for applications where other equipment or scheduling software needs to perform steps on an Innovadyne instrument at certain points in its series of operations.
Instrument Control using User Data Entry and Nanobuilder .DLLs. Nanobuilder sequences can be run from data entry (and other) programs that are compiled and linked using Nanobuilder's component libraries (.DLL's). Such programs can obtain data values from the user's entry for controlling the instrument and then (via calls to Nanobuilder's components) execute the sequences.