Solution Preparation
It's very clear to anyone who does parallel synthesis, that things are much easier to move around if they are in solution. For example, if you want to add 1 mmol of a compound to each of 12 vials, you can sit down at a balance and weigh out the proper amount into each vial. Very tedious. However, it's a lot easier to make 15 mL of a 1 M solution and use a pipette (preferably an Eppendorf Repeater Pipette) and add 1 mL of solution to each vial. But then, if you need to make a bunch of solutions, that can get tedious.
We were looking for a reasonable way to do this and we didn't see why you needed a robot to help when 95% of the work was opening the reagent bottle and weighing out the sample. We couldn't figure out how to get rid of the work entirely, but we thought that maybe we could make it a little more palatable. What if you just weighed out something close and let a computer do the rest of the work. We figured out a pretty good solution and we call it the Solution Station.
