Thorlabs Rotation Motor

 The professor I am working with already had code set up to control the motors rotating polarizers and quarter wave plates in MATLAB, so I've been working on developing data collection code. Since our camera for now is go-pro (we are waiting for a real scientific camera to come in the mail, but that isn't getting in the way of getting work done now!), I built a MATLAB function that detects new saved images, moves the motors, and processes data. It was a lot of work and I don't have a lot to show for it, but it will make data collection much easier later! 




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Paris Life Update #5

This week we saw the large hadron collider, every nerds dream trip. I mean, it’s all underground, but we stood by it and talked about science. Close enough, right? Geneva has some of the bluest water I’ve ever seen! Bonus last photo - we found a neighborhood slide and I way underestimated how fast I could go..
Read more

Prep. for Scanning Electron Microscope

Image
Tomorrow is the ultimate test of everything I've done so far! I've been trying to figure out the orientation of nanorods with polarized light, but until now I haven't had an answer key to compare my results with. The nanorods are too small to determine how they are oriented with visible light, so we have to turn to something with an even smaller wavelength. That's where the scanning electron microscope comes in! Since electrons have a much smaller wavelength than visible light, we can create a topographical map of my sample. If the polarization method I've been working on matches the map, we win!  To get ready, I prepared more nanorod samples on special, conductive slides. Today I took them into the lab and compared them with the regular glass slides to see if the nanorods were deposited correctly. That's where it got complicated. The conductive slides are much thicker than the glass slides and were impossible to view with the 40x objective we were using. The sl
Read more