User:BMoeller
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Bio/Background
Benjamin Moeller
I am a Physics student at the University of Buffalo working toward a B.S. My hometown is Ontario New York, a small, cow infested metropolis located east of Rochester. I started in physics in order to someday build myself a lightsaber. For the summer I will be working on signal processing with Zejie Zhang and Andrew Lingenfelter. I am currently working at Stony Brook, but I will soon be moving to Brookhaven to work on the Mariachi equipment there. Even though the lightsaber plan probably won't turn out, I plan to attend graduate school for either physics or engineering after graduation.
Blog
June 12, 2006
Long day of travel, first meeting today. Everyone seems pretty cool and the project looks very interesting.
June 13, 2006
First part of the day was spent meeting everyone else in the REU group, everyone seems really cool . Including me there are three Ben's in the group. I feared this might lead to identity driven violence, but luckily we were able to sort things out through calm words, deep breaths and handshakes.
Andrew and I met with Zejie (Jay) today and we were introduced to the more technical parts of the project, specifically the Reciever and the data recording software. We were also introduced to Matlab, and tasked to become familar with it in the next week.
June 14, 2006
Learning MATLAB from the internet is proving difficult. I can understand the mathematical basis of the problems easily, but I'm not very program literate and and so this is taking a little more time. Jay said he would return tomorrow to answer our questions so we should make some good progress then.
June 15, 2006
Andrew and I are continuing to learn Matlab in the signal processing lab. I got a few more concepts today, so I was pretty excited. Unfortunately Jay is very busy, and not always able to answer our questions. I don't quite yet understand filter modeling completely but I think I will be able to grasp it in a few days.
June 28, 2006
Very much has happened in the past two weeks. Andrew and I have been further enhancing our computer skills with Matlab and the various software that powers the GPS and reciever units. We installed the new reciever and sound card, unfortunately we are having trouble getting good signal from it. We are also using the Bi-conical antenna and plan to try both the antennas simultaneously to determine which gives a better signal. A trip to radio shack and we should be able to obtain the necessary parts to make all the connections.
July 11, 2006
I need to update this more often.
Yestarday we traveled to BNL and met with Dr. Takai to discuss why our antenna does not get the same spectrum as the one at BNL. While we took screenshots of the system there, we are still having trouble obtaining a good signal at Stony Brook.
I want to start playing with labview soon, as I feel it offers the best flexibility for the future of the radar data aquisition. I also want to start to learn more about it, as I know skills with labview will help me in the future.
Aha. We have discovered that the cause of our bad signal was a bad cable. We are now getting a good signal and could be taking data right now if not for the rainstorm we are currently in the middle of.
July 28, 2006
Alright, large update.
I have been using/learning Labview for the past week or so, in an effort to develop a completely labview based DAQ system. I also recieved a hard drive from BNL that had old files from an older DAQ on it. I was able to extract these files, but many parts of them were missing. I used the format of this old DAQ to design a new one.
Goals for the new DAQ:
1. Import modulated signal stream directly from winradio
2. Import GPS timestamp from serial port with little delay (if a delay, develop compensation)
3. Analyze data in real time segments, delete if useless
So far I have come very close to #1 and 2. No driver or VI or relatively any support for Labview was offered with either of these devices. But I am Ben Moeller, and I do not let small electronic items beat me. Well, I try not to, but this one might.
I originally began by trying to stream the signal directly from winradio. I used an older VI designed by a fellow from Europe for my basis. The streams involve using the "Call dll library VI." This library accesses the API for winradio and reads files from the Dynamic Linking Library, which allows us to utilize winradio's functions with another program. The problem with this is that winradio would need to be completely controled by Labview, as only one prgram can access the library at one time. I have been trying to access simple functions, like Setting the Frequency. But I'm having trouble getting these to work. I don't quite have the computer skills to figure this out, but its very interesting. I may try working on this more this weekend, but I am unsure how much time I will have. So I have concentrated more on the other parts of the DAQ. Designing a VI for Winradio would make an excellent project in the future for an undergraduate with more computer skills.
I can get the timestamp from the serial port by reading the strings from it. Using the VI "Serial Port Read/Write" I was able to send commands and receive timestamp strings from the GPS. While all of these strings are found in the GPS manual, I was running into problems with the termination characters. The company was helpful in this respect, but it still took alot of research to figure this out.
Now that I can get the strings into labview, I needed to format them. I found a few useful date/time VIs on the internet from which I was able to steal/learn. I now have it so that the time will stamp every second, but I have not yet figured out how to get miliseconds accurately. I also am not sure what the lag is on what the GPS sends tot eh serial port. I can deal with the lag from the soundcard buffer though and I have fixed that. I should be able to figure this out soon and be able to timestamp the data.
- 3- I can make a protoytpe for this, but since we don't really know yet what constitutes an event, I am not sure what we can do to classify them.
I also am looking into using labview real-time, as it was mentioned the last time I was at BNL. Hopefully I will learn something about it in the class I take on tuesday.
