I am attempting to get a turbidostat setup working. I am not totally clear about what exactly the target refers to in the automation - is it the nOD, or the absolute OD from a calibration? If it is the former, is there an option to use the latter? I am hoping to inoculate at a low OD (~1:100 or 1:1000 from a saturated overnight culture) and grow up to exponential phase in the vial, and then maintaining an OD at, say, 0.8 afterwards. This is difficult with nOD, but maybe not impossible. I have calibrated an OD, but the automation appears to be using nOD regardless…unsure if this is intended.
There was an automation for this, and I thought we released it as a plugin, but looks like we didn’t…
Anyways, it’s more involved. I’ll preface it by saying if more people ask about this, we can easily ship it with the default software. For now, here are the steps.
We need to create a new dosing automation that uses ODs instead of nODs. This new dosing automation is defined in a Python file. We can use the existing turbidostat.py as inspiration - we are just changing its target. In the following gist, I’ve just replaced all instances of "normalized_od" with just "od": turbidostat.py · GitHub. Note:
the important part is line 37. The variable self.target_od is what you’ll choose in the UI, and self.latest_od is populated with incoming OD signals (which are calibrated, as you’ve done the calibration and hopefully changed your config.ini [od_config][use_calibration] too).
Note the new name of the automation: turbidostat_od - we’ll use this later.
Add this file to your pioreactor in the directory /home/pioreactor/.pioreactor/plugins. You can use this: nano /home/pioreactor/.pioreactor/plugins/turbidostat_od.py and copy & paste the code and exit.
Okay, you’ve just created a new automation! We can test this with pio run dosing_control --automation-name turbidostat_od. This should fail with a TypeError - that’s fine, we don’t want to run it anyways.
Next is to add it to the UI. The automations in the UI are populated from flat files. Here’s the original for the default turbidostat. We can copy this, too. Here’s a gist of the orignal with some variable names replaced to match what we did in Python. Save this file by running nano /home/pioreactor/.pioreactor/plugins/ui/contrib/automations/dosing/turbidostat_od.yaml and copy and paste.
That should be it! Go back to your UI, do a hard-refresh (shift-r) (or just wait a moment and refresh), and your new automation should be in the dropdown. Happy to help more or explain a step in more detail!
Thanks for the detailed reply! This is exactly what I’m hoping for.
I just gave this a try, and I changed from self.latest_od is to self.latest_od['2'], and it seems to be working. I will report back tomorrow morning - but awesome! I’m excited to get going!
