July 9 - July 13 Recap

July 9

Setup

We spent the day testing the equipment to make sure it was still working, as some of the materials appear as though they haven't been used in 20 years.We got a quick explanation of how everything works from the grad students before trying anything out. We also began to formulate how our end-of-project presentation/poster would look like, seeing as this whole thing is already over half over I suppose it was a good time to get started on that.

July 10

Cowboys Stadium Tour

Instead of heading to the lab today, my amigo and I trekked with the rest of our undergraduates to the home of the Dallas Cowboys to see the 2 billion dollar palace in the desert. It was an exciting experience, especially because I got to recreate my favorite moment in Dallas Cowboys history.

Doing Research

July 11

Setup

A continuation of what happened on Monday. We also ran some early tests with the thermocouple. It appears as though there is a lot of variance between the temperature readings on the multiple thermocouples, including differences of at least 10 degrees F. It's a good thing for our actual test we plan on using 7 or 8 thermocouples to counteract this. It's interesting to note that the range on the thermocouples appears to be 0 to 600 degrees C, so it may have issues distinguishing between differences of a few degrees.

July 12

Preliminary Testing

Today we started fooling around with the thermocouples a bit more. We finally transferred our first sets of data from the GL800 data logger to the computer after some hassles with that. The GL800 transferred the data to my computer as a .csv file, which WinRAR didn't know how to handle. Eventually, we were able to get the GL800 to send over the data as an excel worksheet and were able to see the data come up on the computer.

July 13

First Day of Testing

We started doing some tests with our newly functioning DAQ system. All of the components were working as expected, and the data seemed to match what wold be expected. We'll talk with the grad students on Monday to see what more things we can do with our system, as today's tests were rather elementary.