But on the other hand I have plenty of time to digest what I learned on my little business trip last weekend. The good news is that the DM delay I've experienced was well known, and it turns out not to be due to the DM at all. Instead, the problem is that the WFS returns a frame from a buffer somewhere when requested, and at higher frame rates there's no guarantee how fresh or stale that image might be.
The solution is to use a hardware trigger for the camera so it only returns a recent frame when requested. The good news is that the current driver box I'm using for the 61 actuator DM can be modded to do this. The bad is that I have to solder a connection inside this $5000 box. We'll see when that happens.
Other than that I learned just how short my optics knowledge is when I talked about my experiment. Contrary to what I'm seeing, the beam size and intensity shouldn't change with DM commands as long as the WFS and disturbance DM are on imaging planes. Right now light is just beamed in without regard for human life. Some relatively simple hardware changes should solve this, but that means yet another alignment. Really I shouldn't be tinkering with the experiment at this point, but you can't fix stupid.
All said, I should be able to use a 10x10 lenslet array and fix the DM delay, which would allow me to boost the speed up to 100Hz and beyond. I'm aiming for the end of Oct for this, but who knows.
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