Sunday 20 September 2015

7th &14th Sept : Getting a Grip in Every Sense

This post is now about ten days' late - holiday and family birthdays have kept me busy outside work, and work has been rapidly accelerating as term approaches. So this update will need to cover two weeks in one go.

    This time of year always has the sense of racing towards a narrow door in a brick wall at high speed: you really hope you haven't missed anything important. Are my handouts and slides ready? Have I got my tutorials and projects up-to-date? Because if not, next week it will be too late, and term will be spent firefighting.

    But my time has not been entirely dedicated to teaching prep. What has also kept me busy has been the work on grip research, with two items reaching fruition. Firstly, the FATKAT 2.0 software is now operational. This is a rewrite from scratch to address the network streaming issues that we encountered. It stores all data locally on the myRIO, and hence sample rates are decoupled from the host PC. This means that up to about 1kHz can be recorded - though if the host PC is slow, then high sample rates don't display well. It also introduces a trigger for QualiSys, so that data can be co-ordinated for validation purposes. This means that Will Shaw is ready to start runnjng his experiments this week. We also now have two working FATKAT systems, allowing us to operate parallel projects. Very handy for the undergraduate students who will be taking dissertations on grip with me!

The other thing that has me excited is the grip model that Rachel Coats, Mark Mon-Williams and I have been working on, and which has taken an epic amount of time this summer, has now produced some exciting results. I can't say much more until we've had the results published, but suffice to say that we have moved from data analysis to writing up.

Busy times - but very exciting!

  

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