Now witness the power of this fully armed and operational battle station!

My experiment is complete. Today I finally, finally gotten my second DM working from Matlab after more than a few emails, wasted afternoons and computer restarts; thus all the major components are there and functioning. Here's a picture of an experiment in progress:



There are still a few idiosyncrasies to work out, but the basics of sending commands to both mirrors simultaneously seem to be working. Here's a comparison of the effect of random command vectors applied to either mirror or both simultaneousy



Clearly this new mirror doesn't quite have the range of the 31 actuator model for whatever reason, however for generating disturbances it should get the job done.

This week the focus will be on characterizing the new mirror and rewriting my code to interface with it. The first step is to generate a poke matrix; early attempts at calculating one from random commands today weren't that successful for some reason, although poking each actuator individually seemed ok. I think a good plan for tomorrow would be to

1. Try loading the straight 61 actuator configuration file. Does poking each channel give the appropriate response?

2. Realignment. Are all the actuators covered by the beam? Should the beam be resized or altered in some way? Try to eliminate tilt as much possible before proceeding.

3. Assuming all the channels are behaving as planned, try again to generate a poke matrix using random commands.

Once I can generate this mapping reliably, I can go ahead and look at things like linearity and actuator decay. Then, I can use the experimental actuator influence functions to generate DM modes.