Twice I have stopped a run or "skipped to next" run
under v. 1.1. It appears to work fine, all data is processed
normally. No problem? Think again.
A couple of days ago I was about 6 runs into an 8 plate
batch when I noticed the data coming off was pretty
worthless. I decided to skip to the next run. While run 6
then terminated normally, run 7 did not collect data. As
near as I could tell, samples were loaded, electrophoresis
occurred and I could hear the camera clicking--but no data
appeared in the array view. Except for the complete lack of
any data being displayed or sent to the database, the run
terminated normally and the next run (run 8) was fine.
Coincidence? I don't think so, because something similar
happened a couple of weeks ago. I started a run but it
errored out (FM Sheath Pump error.) So I shut everything
down. Restarted and installed a new inline filter. I wanted
to rerun the whole 384 well plate, but I also wanted to get
rid of the plate record that errored out. Instead of
deleting the 384 well plate record, I just linked and ran
it, terminating each run as it started. I then linked the
new plate record and let it run.
The next morning, I was dismayed to discover that the
4th run had been stopped for some unknown reason. (I never
found a fatal error in the error or run logs.) Further, the
3rd run, although listed as "complete" had somehow produced
no data.
I'm not sure what is going on, but it seems that
stopping a run (or maybe only "skipping to next run") has
some unintended side-effects in v 1.1. (No problem there in
v 1.0). Some part of the data collection pipeline gets shut
down in a later run.
My work-around will be never to stop a run or skip to
the next run. Or, if I must, I'll shut down the computer and
machine completely and restart, before continuing.
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