Week 7

The Fourth of July was last week, so Happy Birthday America. It also happened to fall on a Wednesday, so it was nice to split the work week in half. I got to view the fireworks from the uncrowded fire escape of a friend's apartment, which was nice.

For the most part I soldered wires to all three leads of all 32 LM35s. To calibrate them, I found a copper disk and drilled holes around the edge and screwed them in.


















The soldering was very, very tedious. The +5V and GND leads for 16 of them were to be daisy-chained, so that required soldering two wires onto one tiny leg for each sensor, which took some time. But with the liquid "flux" solution it became much easier.

 

I also played around with the multiplexers on a breadboard again, and since I had tested one of chips last week, this was also pretty straightforward.

The only really challenging/aggravating task was manipulating labview to try to get the multiplexers to read out the MUX chips. I had to do some reviewing on binary logic to get that to work, and it still doesn't work perfectly. I hope to learn Python at some point so I wouldn't have to deal with Labview.



Anyway, this is a short post since today is my last day in the lab, so we're going to heat both plates in the blue monster that is the vacuum chamber, and hopefully blow something up. I'm also a little tired from the weekend.

Oh, right. I can't forget. The Rockaway surf report for the past weekend.
Saturday was very small, but the waves were picking up to the knee high range towards the evening near the rock jetties on 90th street. I accidentally dropped in on one of the longboarding locals, and he wasn't too happy. I was genuinely apologetic, but he was still pissed. My bad, dude.
Sunday had more wind and had a few inconsistent sets roll in. But on the plus side, it was a beautiful day, and I got my friend to stand up on a surfboard, so that's a success in itself!