Getting tired

Today I was able to get a new piece of code working on the instruments at MSU.  While I don't need this programme for my data collection on this trip, it was a neat challenge and the folks here greatly appreciate having this running.  During the afternoon I spent a couple hours preparing a talk that I'll give to the group tomorrow; I tried to be efficient as possible, recycling material from other presentations.  I'll run through the slides a couple time tomorrow, but for the most part this is a very informal process.  This evening I dove into the analysis of the data I collected earlier this week; I was able to set-up some scripts to guide the process, but there's a lot of manual work still to do.  After a number of long days and short nights, I can't face going through these measurements tonight.

Suspicious calm

I have just over one week before I head back to NZ and surprisingly I am ok with this fact.  My work is moving along and I believe I've collected the first half of my data.  I still need to check the quantitative results, but so far things look good.  When working on programming another piece of code, I noticed an error in the scripts I used to set-up all measurements to date.  It's a minor issue and I'll be able to correct for this in my post-processing/data analysis. Although things are looking good, I still want to maintain my long hours in the lab in case something goes wrong.

Late nights

Today was another long day in the lab, but I will not complain because I am working long hours running experiments.  Once you find a groove, it's best to keep moving along and that's exactly my mentality the past few days.

Week in advance: 26 April-2 May

This week I want to continue the trend of refining my methods through running experiments.  I am moving out of the "ideal" programming phase, where I now have to get my techniques to work in real life.  Of course this is rarely trivial and despite your best effort you find bugs and glitches in our code.  Currently I am calibrating my techniques using a system material (water), but by the end of the week I hope to have moved on to measuring the response of a complex sample.  I am pleased with how things have been moving along the past couple weeks, but with the end of my trip in sight it's important that I stay on track.

Week in review: 19-25 April

I am to the point, where I can start running suites of experiments, which was my goal for the week.  The instruments are set-up and I have a few layers of code to help automate/streamline the data collection process.  The results generally are looking reasonable, but there are a couple issues that need to be looked; with the biggest concern the post-processing routine.  I mentioned earlier in the week that I have a lot of experiments to run which makes me nervous about time, but once we dial in the current process, I'll be able to knock out half of my run pretty quickly (2-3 days).  Ultimately that would leave me almost a week for the rest of my work which isn't too bad, but it doesn't allow for many curve-balls.

Some experiments

Today I continued working on code to help set-up and automate my experiments.  When it comes to collecting my "real" data in Montana, I have 10 physical set-ups which need to be measured with at least two different fluids and at a dozen or so different shear rates (and each sample holder/fluid/shear rate combination will require a couple different types of measurements).  All together that means I have lots of experiments to run.  The good news is that a single experiment might only take 5-10 minutes.  The bad news is that by hand it can take 5 minutes to set-up a single experiment.  Automation scripts help to speed up data collection, allow me to measure overnight (or other times I am not in the lab) and reduce human error.  That's why I am taking a few days to create some robust time saving code, but alas there's still work to do on this front.  To make sure I don't forget about the "science" behind my trip, I did set-up a few dozen experiments to run overnight which will help me dial in what parameters I can use and what types of measurements will be feasible for my work.

Moving forward

It's been another long day in the lab, but things are moving forward.  Based on some feedback from the instrument manufacturers, I've been able to clean up my programming and now the code works as expected.  Today I wrote an automation program to make experiment set-up an easy process.  Once I had these two pieces of code working, I modified them so we have an additional two variants.  For those keeping track that's 6 new programs (3 pulse programs each with its own automation program).  I ran a single test for each and the results quantitatively matched expected results.

For the past couple hours I've been trying to get a fourth program working, but unfortunately this one is more complex and utilises functions not found in any of the working programs.  I'll self this last piece of code for tonight and come back tomorrow morning.