Biological research is limited by a technical barrier that exists between scientists and lab hardware. Each piece of hardware has its own software, its own file format and its own eccentricities, which the user needs intimate familiarity with to get the most from the machine. Using Antha, a user-friendly but hugely powerful software platform, gives biologists sophisticated, flexible and integrated control over lab hardware. This enables experiments and lab workflows to be rapidly automated, with data automatically integrated and linked to the experiment that produced them.