End of the Third Week

After a telephone conference between Prof. Battat, Dr. Phillips and I on Tuesday morning, I had a list of items to do and look into, (in addition to preparing my first presentation next week):

  1. Design a signal generator system to test multiplexer system (series of dividers)
  2. Design buffer amplifiers given a resistance of 50Ω and a load resistance of 2kΩ
  3. Read into the evaluation board manual for the Cyclone 5 FPGA (and prepare to program)
I set off first to update my design of the multiplexer configuration with a 2-to-4 line decoder/demultiplexer as the logic system for SDs and a mod16 binary counter for the input lines (A0 and A1). We were about to go full circle on the counter system, back to the 4-input design I was working on, but this is absolutely simpler.

In working on the signal generator system as a simulation of the 16-channel mux configuration, I started with a solderless breadboard to test different series of resistances with a battery pack. After the mini-tests, it seemed that a 2.2kΩ resistance worked best for a large divider system. I then converted the circuit to a protoboard and must wait to solder the pieces until we order a 16-pin ribbon cable connector. I also need to drill two small holes to mount an SMA connector onto the protoboard along with the divider system, the pin headers, and ribbon cable connectors.

Professor Battat was also nice enough to lend me a thick, comprehensive book on electronics and circuit design, with an entire chapter on amplifiers and gain. It will definitely come in handy as we start building the actual prototype and as I begin my self-scheduled YouTube tutorial sessions on FPGAs.

On top of designing and learning a few schematics for these components, I'm preparing to present on the development of this electrical readout circuit to the Physics, CS, and Math science center group. As the other students and I haven't finished the project and next week is really the halfway mark, we most likely will be ending the 10-minute PowerPoint with a "Next Steps" slide or dialogue. I'm working on the slides now and figuring out my speaker notes as I go along, Fortunately, we'll have a practice session on Tuesday. Wish me luck!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Hackathon: TechTogether Boston

Image
iOS app Last weekend, I had the wonderful opportunity to participate in Boston's largest all-female and non-binary hackathon! A group of friends and I wanted to digest as much tech and nerd information as possible, and we basically made it our mission to go to nearly every workshop session offered for two days straight. I don't know how we managed this but we did. From 5p on Friday and all day on Saturday, it seemed I bounced from one room to the next with a nap here and there. There was a workshop on rapid prototyping with AdobeXD -- which I am in love with. Then, I was able to create my first phone application during a workshop on iOS app development with Swift  (it's much easier than I had imagined), followed by a workshop at 2am on Android app developmen t. For my very first hackathon-conference, I wanted to focus on skill development and learning, rather than the competition. However, seeing everyone so wrapped up in their individual designs and programming ...
Read more

Women of Color in Graduate School

Image
Recently, I've been asked (by a few people) how it feels to go through graduate school as a woman of color. And, to be completely honest, it's incredibly exciting and exhausting all at the same time. Being a woman of color -- specifically a black woman, particularly in STEM -- has a lot of challenges. If you simply search the phrase "black in graduate school," you will get statistics that are very humbling; articles and think-pieces on how different the Black or person-of-color experience is from students who are not minorities; and other outlets detailing how little support many Black and non-Black students of color feel that they have. In fact, the Council on Graduate Schools recently reported that, in 2017, Black students made up just 11.9% of all first-time graduate students in the United States. (That said, 68% of them were women! So, we are making p r o g r e s s.) I'm not sure what the numbers are at Boston University, but it doesn't seem that far o...
Read more

Truss Design (Final)

Image
We finally made it to the end! After the preliminary design report, it was time to finalize our actual design (since we were given enough materials to make one truss to test). After doing a few more draft sketches and analysis, I was able to pick up on patterns on which types of designs produced the maximum strength (all within the parameters we were given). Finally, I came up with the sketch at the bottom-right, and the MATLAB analysis produced the highest load we were able to reach. We theorized that: two members would buckle first instead of just one (Members 3 and 4); the maximum load is 11.62 ± 0.063N; and the total cost of the truss is $290 (under the budget limit). From there, we moved to prototyping: we cut the straws as close as possible to the lengths specified in our final design. To create uniform gusset plates, our "joints," we used the circular cap of an individual Tropicana Orange Juice bottle. It met the area requirements and acted as a stamp...
Read more