Single chemostat crashes shutting down the whole system

[jbloomy]

Hello all,

We have occasionally been having runs crash mid-experiment. As in the troubleshooting section, this is often due to moisture, and we are implementing measures to prevent this. However, I was wondering if there is anyway to make it so that only the single chemostat shuts down, instead of the whole system?

[harrison]

Hello,

You could try and fix it by adjusting the I2CCom function. Instead of it deliberately crashing things you could get it to set the offending reactor to not “present” (see how the reactors are scanned in scanDevices).

The reason they are currently deliberately crashing together is that there is a hardware safety system that is able to hard-disable all of the electronics/pumps in the whole system. This system is run from the main control computer (so it can’t easily be broken by moisture overflow etc), and sends out a signal to all reactors shutting them off when needed. The idea is that if one of the pumps was left on or something by the user this would then be a physical shut-off to prevent such issues. By doing what you suggest (preventing them from crashing together) you will open the possibility that if (for example) one of the pumps gets turned on and left on and overflows, it will now STAY ON (even if overflowing) because you would have disabled the hardware shutdown function.

So, proceed at your own peril 🙂

[Author]

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