Chemical Sensors Notes FL2010

- Week 1 -- created a modified Elvis subVI to replace a lost subVI used during the summer; created boolean indicators in sixsensors VI to enable us to determine our location in the programming loop; began running experiments in order to determine optimal sensor temperatures at which chemical sensing data can be collected.

- Week 2 -- This week we are working with modifying the data analysis matlab programs created this summer to analyze our collected data. It is now able to call files from this semester's folder, however we are still going through the code, commenting, and making sense of it all.

- Week 3 -- This week was a sad week. After fixing some glitches in our data processing code, we have determined that our current method of data analysis gives completely insignificant results. Leaving the lab with heavy hearts, we have decided that for next week we are to try a new method of data analysis.

- Week 4 -- We started out the week by redefining our code to find peaks rather than zero crossings. we did this by using the standard deviation of the signal and determining how many peaks cross this threshold. We are still playing with this method, as that some signals are showing no peaks while we know that for every signal there must be at least the one initial peak. We editted our method to look at the signal rather than the derivative and eliminated this problem. However, now we are seeing far too many peaks since the signal is so absurdly noisy. We are currently working on designing a filter that accurately smooths our signal without losing any data to eliminate this issue. This is a challenge.

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