6.17.11

I've gone this far, so I guess the least I could do it make a concerted effort to keep this POS updated during the final stretch (I hope). This means I'm going to have to skip all the intriguing stuff I've been up to the last few weeks, so I'll just say its classified.

Amazingly, even at this stage I'm being pushed to increase the frame rate of the experiment. To that end I'm going to set things up to use pixel subsampling, which reduces the sensitivity of the WFS but results in about a 4x increase in the max WFS camera frame rate. I estimate that with this change I should be able to get shit done at around 70-80Hz instead of the 25 currently. At that rate I should be able to crap out volumes of data at an even higher speed. Hooray.

To that end I generated a new reference image/AOI grid today by blocking the DMs and using the reference mirrors. After establishing an oh-shit backup I'll make changes to the slope code tomorrow to get the new WFS image resolution working.

The good news is that at this point I can do stuff like this pretty quickly. Almost too quickly, since I tend to forget what I changed if I screw things up. Soon it'll be time to retire to a rocking chair by the fire, light up a pipe, and stroke by beard longingly while I tell the next generation of students tall tales about fast centroid code and spatial filter alignment.

6.2.11

Christ, will I ever update this thing? I guess that's the paradox of a blog, the more real shit gets, the less time there is to write about it.

Today was the first time I got results I'm really happy with, and which I think are really publishable. Basically, after countless diversions and problems, the experiment is essentially working as planned. Better yet, I was able to get my hands on some experimental aero-optics data, and after even more diversions and problems, was able to use some semblance of those as disturbances.

If I say a prayer and the stars align, I can get a 20-30% improvement in the average target intensity with these disturbances over the integrator. Astoundingly I've been able to use an "optimal" integrator gain found by toying with the sensitivity transfer function.

Anyway, the main point of this right now is that I'm drinking in celebration. And that's no time to waste writing on the googles.