Pump Calibration

1. Fill a large beaker with water and submerge all of the pump lines (inputs and outputs of the pumps), ensuring all of the ends are below the surface of the water.

2. Run the pumps on the Setup page to completely fill the lines with water (about 20s)

3. Place 16 vials into a rack and place the output ends of the pumps to be calibrated into the vials.

It's best practice to not put the vials into the eVOLVER platform in case you make a mistake and overflow the vials. Keep the rack to the side.

4. Select the eVOLVER on the top of the GUI home page to be calibrated

5. Navigate to the Pump Calibration page

6. Enter a name for the pump calibration

7. Select the pump configuration for the eVOLVER. In a standard setup, IN1 are the media in pumps, and E refers to the efflux pumps. If you have another pump array (for a second media input source), it is typically going to be in IN2. Click Start Pump Calibration. The standard pumps are the FAST pumps (~1 mL/s, black pump heads). If you have the slow flow rate pumps (~ 1 ml/m, pink pump heads), select the SLOW radio button for that array.

IN1 refers to address 0-15, E refers to addresses 16-31, and IN2 refers to addresses 32-47. If you have a different pump array setup you can either calibrate manually by putting a json fit object into the calibrations.json file on the RPi server, or reach out on the forum to ask for assistance.

8. Select all of the vials either by clicking the button on the bottom right or clicking and dragging across the vials on the selector. Click PUMP IN (or whatever the pump array you are calibrating) to run the pumps for 10s if the FAST radio button was selected or 100s if the SLOW radio button was selected.

The time the pumps will run will be noted in the bottom right of the screen. If you need to stop the pumps early, click FORCE STOP ALL.

9. After the pumps finish pumping, measure how much water was pumped by pouring out the water from each vial into a 25 mL graduated cylinder (or something similar). Enter this number into the box for each vial. The flow rate will appear on the vial selector on the right side of the screen.

Round to the nearest half graduation. The minimum resolution cylinder we recommend for typical eVOLVER pumps should have 0.5 mL graduations.

10. Repeat this process for each pump array you have selected for calibration.

11. Click the pen button to submit and save the calibration. Then click Exit after the calibration is logged.

12. Verify the calibration appears on the setup page.