SOURCE Day 8
Posted by Nicole Sharp on 09 June 2005 at 18:36Today provided a lot of confidence boosting after yesterday's pitfalls. It turns out that I won't have to do the nasty programming I thought I'd have to do as of yesterday. In fact, in addition to finding a copy of LabView despite the people in charge of such things being out-of-town, I got the program installed and managed to set up a .VI (a program in LabView) to communicate with the motion controllers. I tested it, and it's responding just the way it ought to, which means that I can start worrying about getting the data acquisition control set up in LabView (which should be even easier), and then writing my program to run everything.
The only unfortunate thing is that the motors are giving me some trouble after we messed with their connections a bit earlier today. I don't think it's anything major, but I'd like to get them operating normally before I dive into any more programming.
I had a chance to use some of my experience from working on the 4th floor wind tunnel last semester today, too. One of the other undergrads who works in Dr. Quinn's lab needed to know how to set things up there and run some tests, so I helped her get all of that in order. It's nice to feel like there's something that I really understand and can run--I'm looking forward to feeling the same way about the 8th floor wind tunnel and all of its instrumentation.