9.6.10

So I'm headed out to ABQ tomorrow to check out some other AO experiments irl. Although it probably would have been more useful to go there months ago when I was still tinkering with hardware, hopefully I'll get some nice ideas about how to improve the frame rate of my experiment, something my advisor seems to focus on.

I'm more concerned about the control aspects, and I doubt I'll hear anything interesting about that although you never know. I've made some progress computing the Kalman predictor like I described. Identifying the right disturbance model turns out to be a shittier experience than I thought, and I'm still not sure if I have the best procedure nailed down yet. I wasn't even able to get er done in the single channel case. The one IIR filter (for 5 channels) I managed to implement didn't do much to improve the wavefront error in either simulation or experiment. So either something is wrong with the calculation, or the whole idea of using a simple n-step predictor is mistaken somewhere.

That'll have to wait until I get back, or longer since I'm taking next week off to get out of town before the unwashed masses return to campus at the end of the month. Hopefully I can use that time to wrap my head around some simple RLS and (ideally) primitive lattice filter example in between mountain bike runs.

If I work hard like a good grad student, I think I'm still on track to get a multichannel version of the adaptive filter running by the end of the month, although surprisingly the multichannel optimal IIR filter may come first.