[rickwierenga]

Add a SynergyHT interface supporting endpoint absorbance, built-in 24- and 96-well plate presets, well selection, tray movement, incubation, and shaking before reads.

results = await reader.read_absorbance(
  wavelength=600,
  plate_type="96-well",
  wells=["A1", "B2"],
  shake_duration=10,
  shake_intensity="fast",
)
data = results[0].data

Shake intensity accepts "slow", "medium", "fast", or "variable". A zero duration disables shaking; each read uses its own settings.

Measurements return the same AbsorbanceResult class used by H1 and Cytation, including wavelength, temperature, and timestamp. Unselected wells contain None; instrument overflow produces NaN.

Synergy HT uses the legacy V/S measurement protocol. Share connection lifecycle, command framing, identity queries, tray commands, temperature queries, and operation locking through an internal BioTek base, while keeping assay encoding and parsing specific to each protocol. Existing result-type imports remain compatible.

Includes a hello-world notebook, API documentation, and device registration. Fluorescence, luminescence, standalone shaking, kinetics, 384-well plates, and custom plate geometry are not implemented.

Hardware testing covers basecode 7090202, firmware 2.24: notebook operations and all four shaking intensities and shake duration.

Validation: BioTek unit tests, Ruff, mypy, notebook validation, and the offline documentation build.

[harley-pioneer]

Just tested out on our Synergy HT and it works great! All the steps in the hello-world notebook worked as expected. What would it take to add shaking commands into this? That is really the last piece to enable the reader to do endpoint and kinetic experiments. I'm playing around with it too

[rickwierenga]

thanks for testing @harley-pioneer !

see the latest PR for shaking based on the pcaps you shared

[harley-pioneer]

Awesome you beat me to it. Is this something I can also edit? The shake_intensity numbers do have names:

• 0 = slow
• 1 = medium
• 2 = fast
• 3 = variable

I will have another chance to test this in lab tomorrow

[rickwierenga]

hm, not sure what's the easiest way for you to edit here... just send me your prompts and I'll have it executed

[rickwierenga]

@harley-pioneer lmk when you think this is ready to merge. also feel free to make follow on PRs in the future!

[harley-pioneer]

ok great!

• I confirmed the 4 shaking intensities are correct and correspond to 0, 1, 2, and 3
• Confirmed the shaking time pre-read works

Could be merged as is

Things I can do in a PR I will do today or this week

• I tried power cycling and the .setup() failed to connect with an error of ValueError: Malformed BioTek status: b'\x1e000\x03' causing _check_status to reject the setup sequence. I made SynergyHT accept \x1e000 as "no error" (a \x1e status with a nonzero error code still raises), and setup() now also discards any replies left over from an earlier connection before sending e

2026-10-20 10:14:56,840 - pylabrobot.io.ftdi - INFO - Successfully opened FTDI device: FTNE6HGA
2026-10-20 10:14:57,402 - pylabrobot.agilent.biotek.synergy_ht - WARNING - Discarded 30 stale bytes from an earlier Synergy HT session: b'\x067090202  Version 2.24   \x1e000\x03'
2026-10-20 10:14:58,008 - pylabrobot.agilent.biotek._reader - INFO - Connected to SynergyHT, firmware 2.24

• update the hello-world notebook with updated shaking intensity string options jk i see you already did that
• i would like to update the read_absorbance with an optional flag for it to open the door after reading; default is open door after reading but if doing a loop of readings on the same plate don't want to door to open after every reading

[rickwierenga]

thanks for the pr @harley-pioneer ! I merged this into main. feel free to add follow on PRs onto main