Foehn: An open-hardware asynchronous scheduling hub for high-throughput liquid-handling workflow
Yueyang Gao, Jacob Danks, Simon Dawes, Maximilian O. Besenhard
TL;DR
Foehn is an open-hardware system that enables efficient, concurrent control of multiple lab modules in high-throughput workflows.
Contribution
Foehn introduces an asynchronous scheduling hub with open-source hardware and software for scalable lab automation.
Findings
Foehn achieved 87.6% PWM control efficiency with stable voltage output.
The system successfully executed concurrent pumping, stirring, pipetting, and labware-moving tasks.
Foehn demonstrates synchronization and stability across hardware layers in a robotic workstation.
Abstract
Foehn: An Open-Hardware Asynchronous Scheduling Hub for High-throughput Liquid-Handling Workflow. Growing demand for complex and efficient high-throughput experimentation is accelerating laboratory automation, yet liquid-handling robots, which are central to these workflows, remain constrained by sequential operations that limit scalability. To address this bottleneck, an asynchronous scheduling hub system, named Foehn, was developed to enable concurrent and coordinated control of multiple experimental modules within a robotic workstation. The Foehn integrates open-source hardware based on the Arduino microcontroller with a Python-based graphical user interface, forming a flexible and cost-effective control architecture. Besides, it enables asynchronous, multi-threaded operation through standardized serial protocols, managing communication between the liquid-handling robot and…
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Taxonomy
TopicsElectrowetting and Microfluidic Technologies · Modular Robots and Swarm Intelligence · Advanced Memory and Neural Computing