1.11.10

Ever since the big realignment I've never been happy with the way the disturbance commands were generated. Basically they were always "random,' but it was hard to recognize any flow going on. With this saturation problem I took another look and found that its usually the actuators around the edge that hit the wall first. It turned out that sometimes the disturbance actuators around the edge sometimes also had much larger amplitudes. Coincidence?

Part of the problem is that disturbance wavefronts are mapped to commands using the DM61 poke matrix, which is prone to shittyness and can have noise around the edges. I think maybe this means that the inverse of this is causing problems with certain actuators.

It'd be nice to generate disturbances independently of the WFS, so I cooked up some code today that uses the ideal influence functions instead and an arbitrary scaling to get the command voltages. The results look much much better, and you can even see some resemblance between the SS model output and the actual phases measured on the WFS.



The turbulence now looks more like a flapping sheet, like it should if there's flow going on. I hope this means better predictor performance compared to the old commands.