Entries in "SOURCE"
Research Highs
After 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?)
A Most Exciting Day
Today has been quite a busy and exciting day. I started out by presenting with others at the Second Year Institute this morning. Afterwards, I stuck around for the keynote address from Stephanie Tubbs-Jones, Cleveland's congressional representative. I'm very happy that I did, actually. Her address was enjoyable, and it was refreshing to hear from a politician I don't despise. (As she pointed out, it's only the politicians who misuse politics that anyone hears about in the media.) I didn't know that she was a Case alum. Next time I feel the need to write her a letter, I'll be sure to mention that I'm a Case student. Maybe that will help it get noticed, ha!
When I made it to the Quad, I found most of the biorobotics lab outside for robot filming. The last couple of days have been hectic around there because a crew from Discovery's Animal Planet has been filming between there and Dr. Ritzmann's lab. So I stopped to watch a few minutes of extraordinarily staged shots of Quinn and Ritzmann carrying Whegs II out of Bingham (a building neither works in) and talking. I won't be anywhere in the final show because I had to leave about the time the film crew showed up yesterday, but I'm still looking forward to seeing the final project. Ideally, I think I'd like to watch it with my mother. As a middle school science teacher, there might be something of interest to her there.
When I got home today, I had a couple of important tasks. I wrote a draft of my first letter of recommendation today. A professor asked me to write one for him as a part of a grant for which he's applying. That was a bit intimidating, to be honest, but I think I've got a strong start on it. I'll polish it some in the next few days.
The other important task hanging over my head is an investigation of costs and options for replacing some of the RoboMoth equipment I've been working on all summer with SOURCE. The graduate student who usually works on RoboMoth is back now, and, seeing the problems I faced all summer in person, I think he may be a little surprised at how far I got. A meeting with all of the important parties happened earlier this week, and I was charged with getting cost estimates for upgrading the system. It's a little scary for me, actually, because I know I'm going to end up being asked for a recommendation, and anything we do at this point is going to have a price tag in the 10^3 range at minimum.
And, finally, the last and possibly most exciting aspect of today is this: a friend that I've known for two-and-a-half years online is arriving this evening. Picking her up at the airport tonight will be our first real meeting, even though we've been pretty close since the end of my freshman year. This constitutes the first time that I've met one of my blogger friends that I haven't already known in "real life" as we say in the blogosphere. To say that I'm excited is an understatement. I just hope that we don't make too frightening a scene in the airport tonight!
Research Reflections, Web Sites, and Camping, Oh My!
It's been several months since I started working on a new personal site to put on home.cwru.edu, and though I had a design that I liked and most of the content written, I hadn't uploaded it. Today I was supposed to spend some time explaining my research at a SOURCE luncheon, and I decided to put together a web page that gave an overview of my project, my work so far, my problems, my accomplishments and so forth. I didn't quite get everything I wanted done before lunchtime, but I got quite a lot, including pictures. While I was at it, I uploaded the rest of the site. Here it is.
Continue reading "Research Reflections, Web Sites, and Camping, Oh My!"
SOURCE Week 3
I'm learning that getting an experiment ready is a long line of small successes that don't sound like much when you describe them to anyone else. All the same, things are moving along here in Glennan 809.
Continue reading "SOURCE Week 3"
SOURCE Week 3
I'm learning that getting an experiment ready is a long line of small successes that don't sound like much when you describe them to anyone else. All the same, things are moving along here in Glennan 809.
Continue reading "SOURCE Week 3"
SOURCE Day 8
Today 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.
SOURCE Week 1
So work on the SOURCE project is going along, slowly but surely. After speaking with Dr. White and Dr. Willis, it looks like I will be doing pretty much what I described in my earlier entry. I'm using a wind tunnel on the 8th floor of Glennan, along with the RoboMoth robot engineered by the Biorobotics group that lives up there. (I can say things like this, of course, because I've been spending a lot of time up there since January.)
This week has involved reading lots of documentation files and toying with some of the programming language used to control RoboMoth's motors. I'm not actually using RoboMoth as an autonomous robot or for its tracking abilities, but simply as a sensor whose movements I can easily control. Unfortunately for me, it looks like I won't be able to write a program to move the robot and record my data without using more advanced programming than the sort that I learned five semesters ago in ENGR 131. I didn't quite expect this sort of learning experience when I started out, but I'm game. I have a feeling that I'll be very glad that I've kept up with at least a little bit of programming by playing with PHP in my spare time.
SOURCE Day 1
Now that I'm back at Case, the real fun of the summer can begin! I don't believe that I've mentioned it here yet, but I have the honor of receiving one of the inaugural grants from the SOURCE office for summer research. Back in April, I mentioned SOURCE as a possibility for summer employment, but things got busy and I didn't document finding a professor and a project or writing the proposal.
There was a lot of competition for the limited number of awards, but my proposal for a project (entitled "An Investigation of the Odor Sensing Abilities of Moths") with Dr. Ed White of the EMAE department got some positive attention, so here I am back at Case with funds to cover the costs of staying here over the summer.