Research Highs
Posted by Nicole Sharp on 31 March 2006 at 15:24After nearly ten months of equipment problems and set-backs with my SOURCE/Capstone/senior project, I hit a milestone today. I put together all the little pieces of programming I've done to automate the mapping experiment and tested it. And it all worked!
In brief, the LabView program accepts user input as to the desired circular motion to execute and the number of measurements to make along the way. It calculates where it should be stopping to take measurements, then executes the first of many moves, pauses to take data, does some fairly hefty calculations on the data (see screenshots 1, 2, and 3), saves that data, moves to the next point and repeats the process.
At the end of all of this, I have a file containing spatial, temporal, and statistical information for every point in the flow that I map.
I'm absolutely thrilled that everything worked smoothly the first time I ran the full program. I guess that means that I did a good job programming all the little pieces along the way. This means that I'll be going into the lab tomorrow when fewer people are trying to go in or out of the lab (and thereby messing with the airflow) to spend a few hours mapping out the ion plume. At the end, I should have some nice visuals for my research poster at the SOURCE Symposium on April 20th.
(Speaking of SOURCE, how is it that I have two news items on the front page of their site? Maybe they're falling behind on updating that?)