I really like my Mastertronic. Like someone else mentioned, it's a work in progress. They have a few areas that need some work.
The biggest one, and I think a lot of people will agree with me, is the app, or the app/device interaction, is horrendously slow. And if you get ahead of it, one of two thing will happen. At best, if you're lucky, the command will simply be ignored. At worst, you need to start over, which is annoying when you're doing something that requires multiple steps. You really need to be careful to wait for the app (or the device) to react to anything you do before moving on to the next step. Even things like opening the app and waiting for the screen to fully populate before doing anything. Even though the button you need to click is already there, if you don't let it finish, which can be another 10-30 seconds, it's going to be mad at you.
Along with that, if your phone screen turns off, it disconnects from the device. Generally not a big deal, but if you're calibrating something, you need to make sure your phone stays awake or you'll have to start over. That can easily turn, what should take 30 seconds, but on the MT take 15 minutes into a 30 minute project.
Also, calibrating the pumps and needles is ungodly time consuming.
My other issue with the device is that it seems to lack the ability to do more than one thing at a time. I believe each individual thing it does, has it's own procedure/subroutine in the code and doesn't start one the next one until the first one is done.
For example, when you run a test it (from memory, some steps may be missing/incorrect, but it's just for this example):
1)Prime RO Line.
2)Empty RO Vial
3a)Fill RO Vial
3b)Fill syringe
3c)Empty syringe
3d)Empty RO Vial
Repeat Steps 3a, 3b, 3c, 3d three times.
4)Prime tank water line
5)Empty reaction vial
6)Fill reaction vial
7)Move carousal
8)Move needle to reagent vial
9)Stir reagent
10)Draw up reagent
11)Move needle to reaction vial
12)Empty syringe
13)Move syringe to RO Vial
14a)Fill RO Vial
14b)Fill syringe with RO
14c)Empty syringe
14d)Empty RO Vial
Repeat 14a-d three times
and so on until it's done testing.
IMO, a lot of these steps can be combined with no hardware changes. For example, there's no reason I can see that it can't be filling both the RO and tank water vials at the same time. It *might* only be able to empty one at a time, but they can both be filled. Similarly, one can be filling while the other one is being emptied or having water drawn out of it. Or, it could be moving on to the next step while a vial is just being emptied.
With some extra hardware, like another magnetic stirrer, it could be stirring the reagent while it's doing something else.
I could go on.
Regardless of all that, I really do like it and I think most of the issues I'm seeing should be easily ironed out as it matures.
I do like that, regardless of how long it takes, I essentially just let it do it's thing, whether that means running tests on a schedule and pushing the results to my phone or watching TV while I let it run a test I manually asked it to do is nice. However, there are times when I'm waiting for a test to finish and it's hard no to think that I could have pulled out the Hanna kit and had an answer before this even finished cleaning the vials and syringe.
Oh, one more thing I'd really like to see with the app. The ability to queue multiple (manual) tests. If I want to test, for example, alk, calc and nitrate. I have to run the test for alk, wait for it to fully finish, as in the machine has to be back to 'idle' before requesting the next one. It would be nice if I could just request them all at one and it would do one and then the other (and in a perfect world, wouldn't clean everything at the end of one test just to clean it all again when the next one begins).
I might be an anomaly, but I don't want to buy an equipment that is "in the works". That's what testers are for. If I am going to spend over $1k on a product, I really want most if not all of the kinks to have been fixed. If there are unforeseen issues, that it can be fix quickly.