What else happened on Monday?

Went to the airport with Matt Hart (REU student I work with) and Jason to pick up the WASP. I didn't get to operate it, but I got to carry it. It's heavy. Really cool piece of equipment.

The Scientific Method on a Slow Monday

Question:
There's a sensor in the next room. When I pass it, the lights in the room turn on. Is it triggered by changes in light, or sound?

Research:
The Mythbusters tested an alarm system once. It sensed sound, and they were able to get by it by moving slowly or by using certain materials to muffle the noise they made. I figure this thing might work the same way.

Hypothesis:
The sensor is sound-based.

Experiment 1:
I will throw a screw into the room and see if the pinging noise triggers the lights.

 

Result: The screw did not make a very loud noise. The lights were not triggered. The screw is now lost. I hope it wasn't important.

Experiment 2:
I'll try clapping and making clicking sounds with my tongue to activate the sensor. I hope I can figure this out before the guys who work in there get here...

Result: It didn't happen, and I made an idiot of myself. Guessing at this point that my hypothesis is wrong.

New Hypothesis: It's light/motion-based.

Experiment 3: I'll try waving my arm around noiselessly.

Result: I approached it quietly and it flipped on before I could even try anything.

Conclusion: Clearly, the thing responds to light, not sound. This is different from the sensor I saw on TV because, of course, that was a sensor meant for security, not energy-efficiency. In this sensor's case, it wouldn't make any sense if it turned on the lights and the AC every time something went bump in the night.
Edit: Bob (my supervisor) told me it's infrared. So it might even react to changes in heat.

Some interesting stuff did actually go on today besides my important experimentation. I'll blog about it later.

Day 23

Field trip to Xerox today. Got to hear about some of the things they're working on (not just printing-related stuff, surprisingly) and see a factory where they make their flagship two-ton printers. I like machines, so that was pretty cool.

Days 21-22

Not a whole lot to do at the moment in wake of the computer project. For now, I'm working with some fire research footage and working on my presentation.

Day 20 (August 2)

A pinch of presentation work, a dash of data recording, a couple of calibrations. About done with the computer.

Day 19 (August 1)

Did some work on my presentation for the end of the month. Need to get a better camera than the one on my phone to take some pictures with.

The Mysterious Solid State Drive (July 29)

I was worried today that the SSD I installed Windows on was too small. I had hardly installed anything but the OS on it but all but a couple of gigabytes of the 64GB drive were occupied. Upon further investigation, I found that Windows itself only takes up about 15GB and nothing else on the drive even exceeded a couple of megabytes, meaning one of two things: the drive was defective, or there were big, invisible files taking up a lot of space.

Fortunately, it was the latter case - a couple of well-hidden files called "hiberfil.sys" and "pagefile.sys" were the culprits. They're both files that vary based on the amount of memory the computer has, so with this machine's 24GB they occupied a good forty or so. pagefile.sys had to be moved to the 7.5TB drive where there was plenty of space for it, and disabling hibernation (something I don't think is often used on desktops anyway) got rid of the other one.

So now the boot drive has plenty of free space.