Week Three: MONDAY

Today I accomplished a couple of things; reading and code-documenting, not necessarily in that order. I generally like to break up the day as a mix between reading and viewing code, so that neither become to monotonous.

I finished reading Kruithof's thesis, Magnetic Tweezers Based Force Spectroscopy Studies of the Structure and Dynamics of Nucleosomes and Chromatin (2009), which was quite a read; 9 out of 10, would recommend. I also began reading a thesis by Fan-Tso Chien, Chromatin Dynamics Resolved with Force Spectroscopy (2011), which I plan to finish tomorrow. In general these readings have strengthened my understanding of force spectroscopy. More so, it highlighted more things that I should learn about. I've slowly been creating a list of things to delve more deeply into, in no particular order. Since this project is on magnetic tweezers, it would be helpful to further my knowledge on microbiology, so I've included topics such as DNA, chromatin, and the worm-like-chain model, mostly with respect to their use in force spectroscopy experiments, and what questions we can resolve about chromatin through force spectroscopy. I've also included more technical things, some which I know a little about already, and others which I feel I should know but unfortunately don't since I've never had a class in Bayesian statistics. These are, Brownian motion, Monte-Carlo experiments, and Markov analysis w/ respect to a Hidden Markov model.

Back to the mechanical side of things, I made a couple of important breakthroughs, but I'm not entirely sure of their implications. I analyzed how the motor control board and our code for the control board works more thoroughly. When I initially ran the code, I found that the setup thought it was at initial coordinate setting of -16,777,216 (units, still need to figure out what the units are). Not remembering what I had left the motor at yesterday, I assumed this might have been just where I left off, although it was highly unlikely. I told the code to move the motor to a position of 0. After this, I proceeded to unplug the motor control board from power and the computer. I closed out all of the code as well. Reconnecting everything, the position remains at 0. I then told the code to move to 100,000 and verify it was at 100,000. Closing and unplugging everything only to reconnect later, I found the position was now 0. I noticed that after a move to 100,000, the motor was at roughly the same position as 0. To verify that 100,000 wasn't simply a "rotational multiple of 0" (like on the unit circle, 0, 2pi, so forth), I made a move to 50,000, believing that this should be somewhere in half, and give an initialized number. This is not the case however. This will also read 0 on startup, as well as any non-multiple of these. What this means is, the control board does not hold memory after power down. I also noticed that the absolute moves as used in the code, 25,000, 50,000, 100,000, and 700,000 are not multiples of one another, as they do not remain at the same position. What this also means is that there will be a problem with initialization for absolute moves. Any position the motor is in at shutoff will become the new 0 at startup, so absolute moves no longer are absolute. I also have no idea why the code believed the motor was at -16,777,216 at startup.

I found what I thought could be possible Piezo-related subvi's. All of them are contained within the SimpleMove vi, or within the Piezo-related subvi's as additional Piezo sub vi's. This is good, as it means it should be relatively easy to remove the part of the case structure in SimpleMove that contains the code for the Piezo with little repercussions.

Finally, I began exploring the code above SimpleMove. I found that SimpleMove has instances in InitializeLUT, InitTweezers, MoveTrajectory, the main instance of the code, and UseParFile. I began my documentation of MoveTrajectory, although it is quite a complicated bit of code. For tomorrow, I plan to continue to document these vi's. Also, out of curiosity, I will find what the code believes to be the initial position of the motor.