Ludicrously Good

The refurbished DM came in late Monday, and I finally got all the glass aligned and working today. I've switched to using Galilean telescopes to resize the beam to keep the overall path length small, and the results so far seem to be pretty good. I tested the DM itself for the first time today and the results seem to be almost absurdly good compared to the crap I was getting before.

Here are the actual influence functions for actuators 1-31 (there are 31 total) taken from the columns of the poke matrix:



Each one is almost suspiciously clean. There was a significant pause between applying the command and capturing the wavefront, so it doesn't look like I'm having the problem with actuator decay like I was before. The columns of the modal poke matrix are even more impressive:



Even the high frequency modes are recognizable and look almost simulated. I haven't had the balls to look at the reconstruction error yet, maybe tomorrow. Even better, there doesn't seem to be any actuator decay, shown by looking at the plots of the peak displacement




Compared to the results from Sept. 9 with the old DM this is golden. Note how higher numbered actuators take longer to respond). Right now the WFS is using a lot of subapertures to capture the wavefront in relatively high resolution. After the DM is vetted I'll swap out the optics to go back to a reduced frame and higher frame rates. Hopefully the higher resolution DM for generating disturbances will show up soon as well.

Tomorrow more testing. I'd also like to get the new (faster) DM control code working, which was the original motivation for everything that's gone on the last 3 months.