Arrival

So this morning I was up at the crack of dawn to get to the airport. The first flight (4 hours to Denver) went well. Denver got 2 feet of snow last night, I got a few nice pictures from the air (which I cannot post at this time due to the software supplied by Canon for my camera being stupid). 

My second flight was OK, although at that point I just wanted to get the hell out of the plane. Arriving, I met up with my colleague Andrew McCann, and promptly found that my luggage had been lost somewhere between my flights. As I write this, I'm awaiting a call from United Airlines about my baggage delivery. The only catch is that I'm 40 minutes up a mountain, so timing the delivery won't be obvious if it gets done tonight. Tomorrow I'll be working at Base Camp, so delivery will be much easier. Means I gotta wear the same stuff though, not really what I was planning on doing.

I'm going to go sit down and try to figure this camera software stuff. Pictures to come as I can upload them.

Man, I didn't think there were stil places that didn't offer some sort of free wifi.
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Waiting to get through Customs now. Front row middle on the way to Denver, exit row window to Tucson.
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So busy.

I realize I've been neglecting my followers recently; I'm starting the Next Day Analysis for VERITAS soon. In a nutshell, every day I analyze some data to make sure that nothing has gone wrong with the Array. I'm trying to pull up some pretty pictures and will post them as soon as they are produced.

On another note, I leave for the Experiment Friday morning. Got my Desert Shoes last night. Need to find my hat though.

Ares 1-X Test Launch Today

Just finished TAing my first lab section of the day. Even considering the train wreck that was the lab on conservation of linear momentum, the grades were pretty good, and this lab went splendidly.

Currently the first Ares 1-X rocket is sitting on the launchpad and waiting for weather to go into the green, I'm really excited, but this might also be the energy drink I had this morning because we can't have coffee (or anything else) in the lab.

Will update as the launch continues. Current launch time is scheduled for 11:04AM (bumped back 15 minutes to the T-4:00 resume time to be 1515Z).

More on the Ares 1-X: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/constellation/ares/flighttests/aresIx/index.html

Nasa TV: http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html

"Don't pwn me on this."

Another gem from the most recent lab I've corrected.

This really does happen.

Correcting labs today, I came across the answer shown in the attached jpg. Made my day. 

UDP and making progress.

My VHDL guru contact at UBC has been helping me out a fair deal with getting off the ground with an Ethernet interface for the FPGA. At this point, I at least know what keywords to look for. Also, after discussing it a bit, I decided to go with UDP rather than TCP as my transfer protocol as it is worlds simpler to implement. I may have to do some reordering once the packets are read in by the PC, but given the fact that I'm working with 10G Ethernet, I've got enough bandwidth to add things like a packet counter, for example. 

According to him, on a clean network, packet loss is also less than 1%, which is fine. I'm expecting to be reading out numbers every 100ns, which gives me an order of magnitude higher temporal resolution (100ns vs 2.5 microseconds) than H.E.S.S. had when they first tired the experiment is based on, so losing one or two packets won't neccisarily degrade the signal too much.

If I understand the issue correctly, I may have a workaround for the fact that my embedded processor peripherals don't work. Essentially, it comes down to VHDL being a 'dumb' programming language. Regardless, correcting for this has created a new error (whoohoo) that simply has to do with syntax, and should be resolved shortly.

A quick update.

Last week I did some more research on the components required to build my detector. Gigabit Ethernet was deemed too slow, so I have to go with 10G. The issue is that now I'm pushing the limits of the FPGA, and so I'm going to have to be extremely careful when it comes to programming, due to the fact that the internal component timing is on the order of my data stream. 

After an absurdly large thanksgiving dinner, I'm going to hit the sack. There is simply too much turkey and stuffing inside me right now for me to go on.

Results of the Muon Asymmetry Experiment

I've finished the muon asymmetry experiment, the results can be seen here. To first order, they're all consistent. The fourth data run was taken 3 weeks later, but is still consistent to within two sigma. 

I'm going to be working on a software solution to getting some Flash ADCs to work simultaneously now.

On the FPGA route, I've decided to use 10 gigabit Ethernet, because single gigabit wasn't enough bandwidth. Which means that I'm going to have to be clever in my hardware selection and programming, but what else is new?

Going back to the Experiment

It would seem as though I am heading down to Arizona once more at the end of this month. I'm going to be leaving here the 30th of October and flying back November 3rd (in time for my class the next day, whoohooo). Going to get to see the Array at night. I'm quite excited. I'm going to be helping out a colleague work on the alignment (amongst other things). The flights work out well too, I won't end up in Montreal too late, and I'm going to show up in Tucson the Friday before noon sometime, which is great, it allows me to fit in a whole day of work rather than waste one travelling.

Now, I've got to get back to being a clever programmer in that I've got to write a script that will loop through all my data files and look for muon asymmetries.