Getting back to the lab in 2021 has been a difficult ride. 2020 was a horrible year in the lab. Everything we tried broke and made things worse. Fuses blew and old equipment broke down. It was a difficult year. 2021 is all about rebuilding, one painful step after another painful step.
Today was a microcosm of the year so far. I got into lab trying getting things going. I started to make progress and realized that I needed four or five small parts to go any farther. So back to Digikey for some shopping. And the what crap is up with all of the shipping orders being so delayed? Today it was BNC Female to LEMO FFA 00S Male RF Adapter. Who knows what tomorrow will bring? I wasn’t able to dive in as deep as I wanted to in the lab. I was angry with myself because I found the email where I requested the part sometime ago. I just didn’t finish purchasing it, so now I have to wait. Ugh. I try hard to avoid delays like.
Then it is was time for frustration. I got the research team together. We have been trying to work on getting command over these single board computers for a while now. Understanding has been slow and each lesson has been grueling. Lots of four letter words have been used. Today started in the exact same way. Nothing worked. Ugh!
But then something amazing happened. All three of us got our mini-projects to work almost at the same time. Good Job Rena! Good Job Thomas (I call him TG3!)! Good Job me! TG3 and I got our i2c devices to work and Rena got a cool circuit logic “hello world” program with inputs, outputs, and controls to work. As it is with all of this stuff, now that we know how all of this stuff connects together, it would take minutes to get it all to work. (of course it took us a month to learn that.) Triumph! Pride! And Laughter! We did it! Go Team!
And there is the biggest, baddest, you-cannot-believe-its-not-butter, name change in the works for the physics innovation shop. da-dum da-dum da-dum…
Here are some pictures from of our workspace (Note there are a few pictures of Rosie working at home on this stuff too):
And a movie:
matt wright research lab 