Adding Equipment in iExperiment

In the video tutorial below, we demonstrate how to add and delete equipment to and from a record in our enterprise electronic notebook, iExperiment. Equipment is one of the five material types that are supported in iExperiment. The others are Samples, Reagents, Consumables and Animals. Equipment and reagents are more complicated than simple materials like consumables and samples, because they have components. Like all materials, equipment are shared, so an equipment record created for one experiment record can be easily retrieved and utilized in a record for another experiment.

In addition, we will show how to add and delete properties of materials. A property is a datum associated with a material, such as conductivity of a buffer.

A transcript of the video can be found below.

Tutorial Transcript: Adding Equipment in iExperiment

Hi, and welcome to Colabrativ’s demonstration on how to add and remove equipment to and from a record in iExperiment.
We will start our demonstration logged in as our fictitious user, Tes Turing, viewing the Materials section of an in-progress record.

In order to add a piece of equipment, we need to add an Equipment subsection to the Materials section by clicking on the add “Equipment” button in the navigation tree.
Equipment in many ways is similar to consumables. The one significant difference is that the equipment can be made up of multiple components.
In this demonstration, we will add an HPLC system with a pump, autosampler and detector.
We start by opening the Equipment add-content panel by clicking on the green arrow on the right-hand side of the record, below the Equipment banner.
The Equipment add-content panel allows you to “Add Text” or “Add Equipment”.
We will begin to document the HPLC equipment by clicking on the “Add Equipment” button.
Because we are describing a piece of equipment with components, the first Equipment dialog box should be used to describe the overall system.
You might use a name that allows you and others to quickly recognize this equipment, such as “HPLC System in room B216.”
After completing the equipment system information, click the “Add” button.

In addition to the equipment information you just added, green add and red delete buttons have been added to the upper right corner of the displayed equipment box.
The green add button is used to add components to this piece of equipment.

Let’s add the HPLC’s pump as the first component. Click on the add component button.
You will notice that iExperiment assumed that the supplier of the component is the same as of the parent equipment, and has copied the parent’s supplier information into the component dialog box.
For this component the suppliers are the same, so we will not change it.
You will notice that the component has only a delete button in the upper right-hand corner of its box.
Currently you cannot create components of components in iExperiment.

Let’s add a component with a different supplier.

We can delete a single component by clicking on its red delete button.
As the warning states, “Once the Equipment Component is deleted, it’s gone forever.”
A complete equipment system can be deleted by clicking on its delete button.

Once an equipment system has been created, it can easily be added to another record.
We have another record with an empty Equipment section.
We can now add the HPLC system to this record, by opening the Equipment add-content panel and clicking on the “Add Equipment” button.
iExperiment has an equipment oracle that will find existing equipment whose names match what you begin typing in the name area of the “Add Equipment” dialog box.
Simply click on the one equipment you want to add or keep typing.
Click on the “Add” button to add the equipment to this record.
Note that the complete equipment system is brought into the record, including all of its components.

Material properties can be associated with equipment systems, but not with their components.
Clicking on the green add “Properties” button will display the “Add Property” dialog box.
Let’s add a flow rate to the HPLC system as a property.
There is also a properties oracle that looks for existing property names that match what you begin typing in the property name box
Simply click on the one you want to use or keep typing.

Click on the “Okay” button to add the property.
A property can be deleted by clicking on the red delete button to its right.
As the warning states, “Once the Equipment Property is deleted, it’s gone forever.”
Click on the “Delete” button to remove the property.

Please visit our companion web pages with accompanying videos for instructions on adding other materials, such as samples, reagents, consumables or animals.
If you have any questions or suggestions, please contact us at www.colabrativ.com.

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