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:

Day 24

Today I worked more on the code I wrote -- the Probe beam path code and CCD camera code. I made a start button for the CCD camera code so users can just click the button to gather images. I was still checking my spot size code. They looked right. I also found an extension in Matlab which can easily change my script into an application.

I added the right-most extension ("CCD camera triggering"):

Day 23

Today was a work day! I worked all day on my presentation slides, and I updated almost every slide. As Dr. Qiao suggested, I added more diagrams and explanations to make my presentation more clear to listeners from different knowledge backgrounds. It was a tough process to find relevant images for each slide. Sometimes I had to draw a whole diagram myself. Since I changed some diagrams, I had to rewrite my equations on Latex. I also made more specific about what I had done this summer.

It's pouring rain outside ...

Day 22

Dr. Qiao came to the lab this morning and I showed her my CCD camera software and script on Matlab. Dr. Qiao said that we should sync the delay line and CCD camera, so a computer can control the both the delay line and CCD camera at the same time. Since we didn't have any code to control the delay line, I sent an email to Thorlabs to see if they have any good idea. I also added a simple slide to explain the basic principle of my project.

In the afternoon, I went to RIT Undergraduate Symposium with my brother and Zihao. We listened to all the presentations in the Mathematical science section. Staffs like stress-concentration coupling, spiral waves, and critically packed spherocylinders were really intriguing. After all the four presentations, we finished all the posters. One interesting project was to investigate the use of arrows in mathematics and science. I also went to posters about Quantum Turing Machine (Qubit).

Finally, I worked on making CCD routine more automatically. In addition, I updated my code so it became more user-friendly.

Day 21

I had a meeting with Dr. Qiao today, and Dr. Qiao gave me some great suggestions on my presentation slides.

I finished my ABCD law Matlab code today. Finally, I got a spot size that was very close to the result got from the previous method (5.244824842569mm compare to  5.171716695698mm).  Since I found the beam size was too large to reach the objective diameter, I calculated the original beam size which could fit the objective. In order to find the incident radius, I wrote a very very long equation. Surprisingly, Matlab actually solved it. The answer was a little bit impossible; it was even smaller than the beam size when the beam emitted from the laser box.  However, we can actually change the answer by decreasing the distance between the objective and the sample. 

Day 20

I learned ABCD law today and I was trying to write code for probe beam's path in Matlab; I think this is a good way to double check my calculations. Although I knew how to do matrixes multiplications, I'm not sure how to get spot size.

I was checking camera's exposure again today. I could see the light integrated during a certain exposure time on the images collected. But I couldn't tell the shape of the object. I think there exists a transition time between the light on and off, which caused the decreasing of resolution.

In dark:

Short moment with the light on during exposure time:

 A good news is that Dr. Qiao came back and I'll have a meeting with her tomorrow.

Day 19

I invited Zihao last night, and Zihao actually came this morning. Gerry and I introduced our projects to Zihao, and he seemed very interested in what we are working on this summer ... ...

I asked Lauren my confusion left yesterday and I found that I forgot to consider the diameters of the lenses. After recalculation, I got very close resolutions for the two lenses. Cayla helped to check my calculations today and we didn't find any obvious mistakes in my code. I also looked up convolution and edited my presentation slides a little bit. 

I looked back to Fourier Transform today, and I think I'll work more on Pump-Probe tomorrow.