Final Presentation Day!

It was the final presentation day of my 30-day summer internship!

Surprisingly, Joe had already copied my slides into the computer so I didn't need to copy again using a USB drive. Personally, I feel I did okay on my presentation, and it was nice that everyone went through their presentations well. I felt I really learned a lot this summer, and more importantly, I was able to work on the things I enjoy. 

After the presentation, we got our certificates and recommendation letters. Gerry and I introduced our labs to Ms. LaBarr.

In the afternoon, I worked on my final task: write a document to record all the things I've done. Dr. Qiao also told me that the results I got might be continuously used by other lab members. So I needed to write every detail down. It was during this process that I realized I did so many things in these short thirty days.

Finally, Thanks to everyone in the AOFIM lab who supported me all the time! It was indeed a wonderful summer!

The day before final presentation

The day before the final presentation!

In the afternoon we had a presentation dry run with Dr. Qiao and Lauren, and I got many suggestions. So I worked on the presentation all night and fortunately, I finished editing and was able to practice a couple times. I changed the .gif image to three separate photos so it doesn't look too distracting. I also made my control model clearer so it looks like a complete cycle.

Day 29

Today is our practice presentation day!

I really enjoyed knowing other interns' projects and I learned a lot through their presentations. As I predicted, my presentation was still too long: it took more than twelve minutes. (supposed to be within ten minutes). I also received some very helpful suggestions for my presentation. For example,  with Titus's suggestion, I changed my probe beam's color to yellow so it's easier for viewers to differentiate the different types of beams. Also, Matt suggested me to change my delay line into real images, so I used a gif file maker suggested by Henry to make a gif image. 

In order to take a small video of the delay line, I turned on the delay line again. Surprisingly, I realized that I deleted by mistake a command to pre-set the "jog" mode last time, so I looked up the method book again to reset the single-step jog mode. 

The APT motor control method book with hundreds of methods:

The delay line jogs from zero point delay point to a certain distance away:

Day 28

I worked on my powerpoint slides all day. Dr. Qiao gave me many suggestions on my slides and I was editing them. Finally, I finished my slides before I left.

In the night, I practiced several times and did a powerpoint recording. I also presented it to my Mom and my brother. It was 15minutes long (the presentation is supposed to be 10min); however, I realized I really couldn't remove anything more from my slides.

Day 27

This morning all the lab members were preparing our short presentation to Dean Sophia. I made three slides for this presentation and I talked about the principle of Pump-Probe imaging system and the system I want to build. It was also a very good chance for me to learn what Ph.D.s are working on.

We need to finish our slides by next Monday and I felt that I still need to update lots of things. Currently, I have 18 slides, and I'm trying to shrink them down to 8-10 slides.

Day 26

It's getting closer to our final presentation.

With Lauren's help, we inserted the GPIB expansion card into the PC. The PC is too old and many drivers need to be updated. The whole afternoon I was updating software and drivers, from NI updating service itself to Labview. Besides that, I worked on slides to make them look better. In the slides, I added what I'm working on now and what I'm trying to do. Building a correct set-up is such a challenging and time-consuming task -- I was looking for a single connector during the day but still haven't found the correct one.

My plan for the whole system:

Day 25

This morning when I was reading the delay line software manual I realized that the software itself can set triggering to the delay line stage. One thought was to set "perfect" delay time both on CCD and on delay line software to make them work automatically. Considering this "perfect" would never be possible due to the uncertainty of CCD exposure time and delay time, I still needed to find a way to sync all the things together. Fortunately, I found another way to solve the problem. I downloaded Thorlabs' APT controller, which supported Labview, C++,  and Matlab editing. I wrote the Matlab code to control the APT, which was connected to the delay line. APT works like a server, while Matlab scripts work as a client.

I tested my stage moving and the "jog" worked pretty well: