Hi Xiaojun.

You can change that sampling frequency if you want. This is set by the ‘cycleTime’ variable stored under ‘Experiment’ in sysData variable. If you change this then the pumps will indeed change in terms of the loop they run on to achieve a smaller duty cycle. I would perhaps in that case leave the pumps at 60 second dilution frequency…

Why exactly do you want to have less frequent measurements? If you don’t need that much data I would suggest leaving it at 1 minute and then just time-averaging to get better signal vs noise.

Interesting!

As a first measure I would recommend just reducing the intensity of whatever LEDs you are using to excite the fluorescent proteins. This will directly reduce the light dosage, and depending on your culture density potentially not make too much difference to the signal-to-noise of measurements.

If that is not enough, I would update the MeasureFP function such that each 10 cycles it takes a measurement, and the other 9/10 cycles it just just does nothing. That will allow the pump/OD control algorithms to keep running on a 1 minute cycle, whilst fluorescence excitation is less frequently. I think it is a good idea to keep the OD regulation on a 1 minute cycle because if you make the time between measurement/actuation changes much 10x longer it would be much less accurate…

You should be able to retrieve this as it is stored globally. For example, you could put the code that does the fluorescence measurement inside an if statement of the form

if(sysData[M][‘Experiment’][‘cycles’]%5==1):

This would mean that only each 5th cycle would it execute this measurement.