Packed... again

Well here we go, again... I am all packed and ready for a big trip.  There was an obvious sense of déjà vu tonight as I carried home my hard shell case full of various pieces of lab equipment.  Filling the case took the better part of an afternoon and this evening.  The rest of the day I focused on cleaning up my desk and workbench (which I always find is a terrific exercise before going away).  Prior to bubble wrapping and interlocking parts into my luggage, I laid out all my electronics, wires, screws, etc. to try and make sure I have everything necessary.  Unfortunately, I am sure something has been left out or forgotten, but I am confident I can make due with my material at hand and a dose of improvisation.

One more day

Today I started setting equipment aside for packing, cleaning up my workbench, soldering final components and 3d printing spare parts.  As the week comes to a close so does my prep work for Montana.  As you would expect there's always work I couldn't get to, but today and tomorrow I need to focus on making sure I am organised to work away from the lab.  My writing, programming and even testing can be done on the road, provided I have the correct materials.  I'll finish up tomorrow and will be ready to hit the road by the time I check-in next!

Mistakes

Today I continued testing my latest batch of circuit boards and although early tests looked good, I eventually found some errors.  My hardware (including the electronics) is designed to be modular (i.e. use this and that for one experiment, but swap out thing 1 for thing 2 and run a completely different test).  The core functionality of my circuits works as expected and has the benefit of a handful of revisions.  For more complicated experiments, additional PCBs are needed and the latest versions of these boards have error; thus I'll have to revert back to a previous version.  You might ask why I bothered to make new boards if the old ones were "good enough" and the answer is simple, I've made changes to the power supplies to reduce the noise I measure during experiments.  Also the newer boards are more compact, making them easier to set-up and adding a bit of wow factor, but I'l admit these are secondary concerns.

I'll make notes of the necessary revisions and bank these in case I have an opportunity to reprint the boards in the future, but with only a few months left until I submit my thesis, it's unlikely I'll have new boards made before I submit in September.

Despite things not working out exactly to plan, I left work with a clear sense of what to do tomorrow and Friday as I finish my preparations and pack up for Saturday's flight.  Even though I am taking some of my "old" circuit boards, I at least know what to take!  Which helps when the flight leaves in less than 70 hours.

Tests!

I started today off slowly and a bit behind schedule as I am continuing to recover from some kind of cold.  However, despite a late start, I was still able to get in a full day of work.  And that work centered around testing and fine tuning my latest batch of electronics.  I am a bit too tired to go into great detail, but I'll just say everything is on track and looking good.

Choices

Today I spent the morning and a good part of the afternoon trying to develop a web interface to communicate with my home built hardware.  This was a neat new challenge where I started to teach myself a couple new programming languages (HTML and JavaScript).  I actually started on this problem yesterday afternoon and was already having some limited success using WebSocket to bridge my web page to the TCP socket connected into the main processor of my device.  Ultimately I learned that my apparent success was a farce and that I was back at square one.  However, before diving further into the problem, I had a think about the cost/benefit of the task at hand.  While this would be a nice feature to have and a cool proof of concept to demonstrate future strategies for instrument control, I concluded that there are more important ways to spend my time.  After a quick coffee break I returned to my desk to discover that my latest PCB had arrived and I spent the rest of the day populating the board.  As it was late by the time I finished soldering all the components, I decided to wait until tomorrow to fire up and test the circuits.

Tired, sick?

It was a great day and my work is progressing, but I worry I might be getting sick.  Not much else to say at the moment.  Time for rest and hopefully I'll be able to carry on tomorrow.

Code

Today was a solid day of programming as I worked to up date my user interface software.  I am making solid progress and hope to finish up in the next day or so.  I also received my latest batch of parts back from the machine shop.  Not much else to say.  Still making progress, still moving forward.

Positive energy

I am feeling a certain buzz from today as I continue to make progress at school.  First up, I've finished updating a crucial section of the hardware documentation, next I wrapped up helping another student prepare for his upcoming defense, I've moved on to a new programming task and overall I feel very positive about my current situation.

Things are coming together nicely for my trip overseas and I can see how I'll be able to wrap up my lab work over the next month.  Exciting times!

How many days?

Back to work this morning... to start my day I took care of the backlog of emails, paperwork and arrangements for my conference trip in August.  Later in the day I spent time preparing bits and pieces for my trip later this month (making cables, 3d printing parts, etc).  I also spent a touch of time adding to my documentation files.  I ended the day helping another student who is finishing their work in advance of his PhD exam next week.

Looking at the calendar, I have just over 10 days before I head off overseas again.  Things are looking good, but the days are flying.  I think it'll be a long weekend in the lab, but we'll see how things work out.

Focus

I admit it... today I had trouble keeping myself focused.  Throughout the day I chipped away at a mountain of writing, but numerous times my attention was drawn elsewhere.  The biggest distraction of the day occurred in the afternoon when I helped another student design and print a new part for their project.  What can I say, somethings just seem so much more interesting that creating user guides and help documentation.  Bahhh.

A beast of its own

Today I spent more time preparing my hardware's "user's guide" which is starting to turn into its own mini thesis.  Earlier this week, my thought was only to update the documentation that I use (the codes for communicating with the instruments), but I am now focusing on documenting the entire system. Part of my inspiration comes from the fact next month I'll be lending out some of my equipment to another lab.  This means that as I sit down and focus on finishing my studies, other researchers and students will be able to continue using the hardware to generate data.  To me this is a welcome thing as I have always wanted my recent work to not just fuel my thesis, but to also become a legitimate tool that outlives my studies and can continue to be used in the years to come. Besides, a great deal of what I use in this manual can be slotted into my actual thesis (a bit of a win win).

Impromptu day at home

Today I stayed home to take care of personal jobs.  No work related news to report.

Writing of a sort

Having accomplished nearly everything on my "wishlist" for updating the firmware programming on my homebuilt instruments, I've started to update the documentation and help files.  Although these pages are not fit for slotting straight into my thesis, I believe the output will be of value when it comes to sitting down and finishing my dissertation.  Additionally, I will be handing off some of my devices on my trip overseas next month and it's important to not only have working hardware, but support for future users.

A broken record

Even I am getting tired of hearing the same story each and every day, but the fact is today I continued developing my software.  In the lab, hidden away in my little closet, glued to my computer, writing a line at a time.  I am still thoroughly enjoying my work and I am pleased to report I am still moving forward, making great progress.

A stride

Today I continued my work, finishing a number of a programming jobs and printing two new parts (after a few prototypes throughout the week).  Triumphantly, I'll be bold enough to declare I've found a stride at school, but of course this comes at the end of the week.  And here's the challenge I've been faced with numerous times over the course of my PhD... continue my work into the weekend, potentially burning myself out for the coming week -or- take a weekend to rest and start fresh on Monday.  Neither is a good decision; I can say this with plenty of experience of both scenarios.  Frankly I don't know which choice is the 'right' one, but I will admit this is not an uncommon decision for a postgraduate student.  At the end of the day, it's best to look at the coming weeks/months to see if there's an urgency to your work or if it's best to pace yourself for the days ahead.  One of the most difficult tasks over the past three years has been to reign myself in, limiting the length of my workday or work week, but I've come to realise that while there's a certain short term gain to long work hours, these can wear one down in the long run; a most unwelcome occurrence during a PhD.

Another job

Today I laboured through another task on my programming to do list.  This job in particular has been on my radar for months.  Thus I felt mentally this would be a good start to knocking out this moutnain of work.  I don't know if I can take away any momentum from today as it was difficult to stay focused on the work at hand.  It's interesting because I typically enjoy writing and troubleshooting code, but for reasons unknown I stuggled to stay on task.

It's a start

Today I've started to attack my (long) list of programming jobs.  At a high level, I have code which runs on all my instruments, then I have a complete graphical user interface to control my hardware and finally there are analysis scripts to process experimental data (plus there's code for the NMR instrument and for those experiments, but I am not concerning myself with these programmes at this time).  What this means practically is that if I wish to make a change in part of the chain, I need to account for this edit in my other programmes.  For instance, you can't change the user interface to give new options, if the firmware on the instrument can't do anything this that information.  And it's no point in telling the hardware to record additional data, if the analysis scripts don't treat this information.  Now for big "problems" it's easy to solve these issues one at a time in each piece of programming, but when I have a punchlist of approximately two dozen small changes it becomes difficult to track.  Anyway, that's the work I have cut out for me over the next few days.  Trying to improve my product without breaking the system.

Another check

Today I was able to sort out my electronics projects; wrapping up revisions and ordering new parts.  Also during the day I started printing parts using our 3-d printer.  I didn't get a chance to work on anything else, as these jobs are highly technical and are quite time consuming.

One down

Today I believed a prioritised set of blue prints to the mechanical workshop.  Although there are only four weeks to fabricate my parts, it sounds as if my requests were reasonable enough to expect all the work to be complete in the allotted timeframe.  However, in case there are any hiccups (which can happen) I've rank the parts to make sure the most mission critical jobs are completed first.

With my plans submitted to the machine shop, I moved onto my printed circuit boards.  I am in the process of revision and I hope to finish my updated versions tomorrow.  I'll need to create a bill of material for the new boards, but once this is completed I'll be able to move on to other work (namely programming) until the PCBs come back from manufacture.

New opportunity

Over the past couple months new collaborations have started (the result of a student visiting our lab in March and my trip overseas in April).  As a result, I sit on the edge of new research questions with the tools to explore these ideas.  What this means in the near future is that I'll be heading back to Montana in June.  This will most likely mean that my submission date for my thesis will be pushed back as I will not be focusing on writing over the next two months, but will instead be continuing developing new hardware and research methods.  In the even more immediate future, I have four weeks to work on new hardware, electronics and software.  My first plan of attack is to finalise my mechanical designs and figure out what can be produced in the available time.  This is a touch tricky, because I am relying on my collaborators to drive the science questions while my job will be to design the equipment and experiments to tackle these problems.  Thus before I can finish any blueprints, our group needs to prioritise our goals.  And this is where we sit today.  After a Skype chat late last night, emails throughout the day and a long phone conversation this afternoon, it's still unclear how we want to proceed.  As it's the weekend now, it's a perfect opportunity to take a moment (for all involved) to review our strategy, but come Monday morning it will be time to finalise our ideas.  Four weeks is very little time when it comes to fabrication (either machine work or electronics) so it's essential we begin the process as soon as possible.