Something a bit different than my past videos as this is a work related repair! As an in-house engineer for a biotech company, one of my biggest challenges is dealing with the repair prevention strategies lab equipment manufactures employ - refusing spare parts, service manuals, schematics, etc. Some are worse than others, but this company Molecular Devices is a top offender.

The SpectraMax ABS Plus is a spectrophotometer for 96 and 384 well plates. This one developed a 401 filter wheel error. I determined the error was likely due to the instrument's optics becoming misaligned. Since MolDev refused to provide a procedure for the alignment, I taught myself a way to do it. I decided to share it here because MolDev will charge up to 50% of the original cost of their instruments to fix them (this one was $15k new). Be advised this is not the official way to perform this alignment, but hopefully it will help someone else. Also be advised you open these instruments up at your own risk, but as long as you are careful, you are unlikely to make any issue you are trying to fix worse.

in addition to the alignment, I also do a bit of a teardown, describe how these work, and do a lot of ranting 😂 Thanks for watching!

0:00 Intro
2:24 how the instrument works/teardown
7:00 the 401 filter wheel error
12:50 the Power-On Self-Test (POST)
14:25 Orders of diffraction/homing of the diffraction grating
16:00 using the POST to align the grating
17:45 The SprectraTest ABS1 validation plate
18:35 Externally controlling the Xe flash lamp
20:35 – Pulse Generator settings for controlling the lamp
21:35 – Switch SW1 on mainboard
22:25 – Observing the POST in action
23:18 – Where to align the zero-order reflection
24:40 – Moving the grating to adjust resolution
25:50 – Adjusting the grating left to right
28:15 – Showing how to adjust grating left to right by powering lamp externally
31:30 – SpectraTest ABS1 plate & ABS1 validation procedure in SoftMax Pro software
34:00 – Effects of adjusting grating resolution on wavelength accuracy
37:00 – Calibration verification results post in-house optical alignment
38:23 - Outro