Week 2: Friday

Today I worked primarily on experimenting with the motor control VI and documenting the SimpleMove vi and its sub vi's. I also did a little bit of reading on magnetic tweezers. But first, I'd like to share with you the current setup we have for the lab.

We took the floater table from the nuclear lab and moved it into the middle of the room. Also featured is the new computer.

I started the day by messing around with the motor control board, the motor, and the VI that's supposed to run it. I improved over my messing with it from the other day by managing to successfully make it rotate in the opposite direction today. Although I initially thought that the code written for the control board would be bug free, I discovered later in the day that there would be certain cases in which the code would break. For example, starting from point zero, it is possible to move the motor in the wrong direction into negative absolute points. This could be bad for the MT setup, as it could result in the motor moving when it cannot physically move due to a barrier. I also found that when just launching the VI, the code does not always recognize what is zero for the motor.

The motor setup: A control board straight out of the box (or in it), a motor, and a breadboard. A USB cable leads to the computer. A power supply runs off of the table to the control board.

A picture of the control board that we are using. It is a Trinamic TMCM 6110 motion control board.

I also ran into issues today with the code that calls the move controls for the motor. Yesterday I attempted to see if deleting parts of that code that don't pertain to the motor control would allow for it to run even though we don't have the other parts that the parts of the code that I deleted refer to. Unfortunately, today I found that it still will not be able to run, as the unit calibration and timing sub vi's will not run due to missing files. It's possible that if this overhead code that calls the motor control code fixes the problems with zeroing I mentioned earlier, but I'm not 100% sure.