The presentation itself, rushed into production like a Soviet washing machine, went over well. Taking a hint from all the seminars I've slept through, I tried to avoid putting in too much text that would be ignored and instead focused on graphics and charts that I could explain. In my experience, this approach is what usually separated a presentation given by a grizzled transparency veteran, new to powerpoint but not to verbose explanation, and a recently minted academic who still possessed the new PhD smell.
Scheduling it during finals week turned out to be a blessing. Since most of my committee had limited time to spare between giving exams and review sessions to the little ones, I only had an hour or so to talk. A mere 40 minutes remained by the time everyone arrived and I finally opened my mouth, but this limit meant that I could avoid any really technical questions.
Anyway, with a supposedly clear path ahead, the next step is to install and test out the new 61 actuator DM we received. I actually came in a few days over the break to do some alignment, despite the department's attempt to prevent this by turning off the lights and stopping garbage collection. This week the focus will be on commanding the mirror itself. This new mirror only has twice the actuators, but apparently sending it commands is ten times as difficult. Rather than a simple USB driver box, signals to this mirror travel through an NI DAQ card before hitting some other voltage amplifier that actually connects to the actuators. To use this system with Matlab I'll have to upgrade to 2009A, and use the .NET interface to access the DM driver's DLL library. Hooray.
A rough, optimistic schedule of events:
Tues: Finish installing cables, test mirror functionality using V. 1.8 software, begin dissecting AOS .NET example code
Wed: Upgrade Matlab if possible, continue code dissection
Thurs: Adapt code into Matlab DM control function
Fri: create 61 actuator poke matrix
No comments:
Post a Comment