June 25 - June 29 Recap

June 25

LabVIEW

With the program fully installed on my computer, I spent the majority of the day learning the basics of LabVIEW. With occasional assistance from the grad student, I worked my way through some of the tutorials built into the program. LabVIEW comes equipped with about 20 different practice topics, each divided further into a few smaller chapters. These chapters consist of approximately 25 slides of notes and a few practice situations at the end. It took all day to get through about 4 of these. Needless to say, this will take some time.

June 26

LabVIEW, Meeting

Tuesday began similar to Monday did, making further progress with the tutorial program. In the afternoon, the grad student showed me and the other undergrad around the lab a bit, introducing us to some of the equipment, as well as how it's used. At the end of the day, the professor held a meeting that included the other grad students working under him as well as my partner and I. The meeting served as a progress report for each of the six grad students and their projects. At the end, the professor talked to my partner and I about lab safety and showed us a news report of a guy getting his face melted off from unsafe lab conditions.

June 27

LabVIEW, Meeting

Reminiscent of that Bill Murray film Groundhog Day, Wednesday was almost a carbon copy of Tuesday, except the meeting was in the morning and didn't involve people getting their faces melted off. After the meeting we worked on more LabVIEW tutorials. In the afternoon, the grad student gave us some situations he came up with to test our new skills. We got to take data off of the microgrid in the corner of the room, and had to use a few different methods of displaying it. After making some progress, 5 o'clock arrives and we agree to finish the rest of it tomorrow.

June 28

LabVIEW, Lecture

We begin the day where we left off yesterday, trying to get the data off of the microgrid and onto the graph on LabVIEW. By lunch time we have finally finished this task. In the afternoon, the grad student gives us a lecture on a few of the things going on in the project. Topics covered ranged from circuit theory and power generation to some tips in LabVIEW to make our lives easier. Time spent with the grad student seems to be infinitely more efficient than with the LabVIEW tutorial. At the end of the day, he assigns us what would be our final practice situation with LabVIEW, combining data from multiple modules on the microgrid on one graph.

June 29

LabVIEW, Discussion

The task that was assigned on Thursday ends up taking our entire morning, but thanks to some of the tips we learned from our lecture yesterday, we were able to complete it in a timely manner. After lunch, the grad student reviewed our worked and pointed out some more places we could have improved our code. At the end of the day, we got a surprise visit from a grad student working on a different project, informing us that we were going to be working on his project from now on, since it would be more hands-on and be better for our end-of-program project (a report and poster). For the weekend, we are given new tasks, learning about thermocouples and the signal conditioning methods used to interpret their output. Hopefully we can still use what we learned from the last two weeks on this new project.