Day 10

Today I spent most time writing code. The first time I connected the CCD camera with my laptop by programming in Matlab. After CCD camera captured images, these images would be automatically saved in a folder. We could turn on the laser beam, and we could start the CCD camera now. However, a very tough problem came to us: How to make CCD camera capture the image at the exact time when a single laser pulse reached CCD camera's surface? It would be easy to solve if we could just turn on CCD first and take pictures all the time until capture the single laser pulse, but the frequency of our CCD camera is too low. So we need to come up a way to emit the laser pulse and turn on the image at almost the same time.

We gradually realized we had to solve this question by using computer and machines. We could not use our hands to click two "start" buttons (one for laser box, one for CCD camera) at the same time since the time for probe beam to travel through its distance is about 1e(-8) s -- much shorter than human's reaction rate. Lauren gave me four possible solutions and I needed to decide which one would work the best. Since the laser's software does not allow us to set up the time to start, we decided not using that software. After discussing with Lauren and Zhila over and over again, we finally narrowed the four choices down to two: either connect both CCD and the laser box with a delay box then connect delay box with a computer, or connect CCD with a computer and connect the laser box with a delay box separately. After that, I was reading the manual of the delay box.