Hamilton Waste Chute

A waste chute is a hole. Labware goes in and does not come out.

That sounds too simple to need a driver, but it does need one, because Revolution tracks every piece of labware in the system and something has to tell it that a plate has ceased to exist. The chute is where that happens.

At a glance

Type	Labware disposal — passive, one location
Locations	Exactly one: the chute opening
How disposal happens	Automatically, whenever labware is placed on the chute
Revolution control	One operation, for manual testing — a schedule does not normally call it

Specifications

No manufacturer specifications are published for this device, and none are stated here. The Revolution device is a generic waste chute: it models the disposal, not a particular part number. What the chute physically is — its aperture, what it empties into, whether it is part of a liquid handler’s deck or a standalone bin — is a matter for the platform it is built into.

The one hard constraint is the aperture. A chute has to swallow the tallest and widest labware a schedule will discard, and a plate that jams on the way down is a manual intervention. Check the opening against your labware before a schedule starts sending things into it.

Supported methods

• Dispose labware — complete and remove whatever labware is currently on the chute

That operation exists for manual testing and commissioning. A schedule does not need it, because disposal is not something the chute is asked to do — it is what happens when a plate arrives.

The important behaviour is automatic. When a mover places labware on the chute’s location, Revolution disposes of it on the spot: the object is completed and removed from the system. So a schedule discards a plate the same way it moves a plate anywhere else — it transfers it to the chute, and that is the end of it. There is no separate discard step, and nothing to remember to call.

The corollary is worth stating plainly: placing labware on a waste chute is irreversible. The plate is gone from Revolution’s records as soon as the place completes. There is no retrieval, no undo, and no pick from a chute. A mis-routed transfer to a chute location destroys the plate’s identity along with the plate, so the chute’s location is one worth double-checking in a schedule that branches.

Integration

There is no cabling, no communications, no vendor software and no configuration. The chute is geometry and a location.

Prerequisites

• The chute’s single location must be taught to the robot that will serve it.
• The aperture must clear the labware the schedule will discard — including lidded plates, deep-well blocks and tip boxes if those are going the same way.
• Whatever the chute empties into needs to be sized for a run, and emptied between runs. Revolution tracks the labware it disposed of; it does not know how full the bin is.
• Where the chute is part of a liquid handler’s deck, the deck position must be free and the instrument’s own software must agree it is a waste position.

There are no device properties to set.

If you need a different disposal behaviour — a counted chute, or one that refuses labware it cannot take — get in touch.

Operations

These are available from a Run Device Operation step.

Dispose Labware

Completes and removes the labware currently on the chute. Labware placed on the chute is disposed of automatically, so this step is only needed to dispose of it by hand.

Raise Error

Makes this device report a failure on demand: the step fails with an error naming the device, and the operator is offered the usual error recovery choices. No command reaches the instrument and nothing moves, and the failure is raised in simulation as well as on a real system, so this is the step to use when rehearsing how a schedule handles a device failure.