ARTICLES

Moodle Workshop

As I mentioned earlier, I have been asked to give a workshop on moodle. Last week it was held in Bilene As you can see from the pic below, it’s a great site to relax and enjoy the blue waters. Apparently in November until February this place is full of people. But it’s not a bad site to have a workshop, eh?

View of the beach from the hotel. It’s a lagoon that’s open to the Indian Ocean …. Just absolutely crystal clear water!

Read more “Moodle Workshop”

RESOURCES

AC Impedance Software tools

Over the course of my Ph.D. I’ve had to write programs to automate data collection
or processing. They are:

HP 4192A LF impedance analyzer interface & data collection. This program will interface with the analyzer, setup the instrument, trigger the instrument and collect the data. The data is stored in a .csv file in three columns. The data format is: complex impedance (|Z|), phase angle (Φ), frequency (Hz). I intended to include a temperature ramp, however I did not have time to complete to throughly debug and test the vi. I believe this is compatible with LabView v 7.0

AC-2Probe.vi (zip)

[mautic type=”form” id=”3″]

 

HP 34401A multimeter interface to collect voltages from a photomultiplier
tube as a function of time. Under cross-polarized microscopy, crystalline
domains within a material are visible. By using a photomultiplier tube one
can quantify the amount of crystallinity in a given area, and if done so
with respect to time, the rate of crystallisation can be quantified as well.
The experimental setup placed the sensor in the occular eyepiece and connect
the sensor to a multimeter which was interfaced with a PC. The sample was
then either heated isothermally or through a temperature ramp controlled
by a Metler-Toledo temperature controlled hot-stage.

VT.vi (zip)

[mautic type=”form” id=”5″]

 

SigmaPlot Macro: I needed a way to quickly process the data collected by AC impedance spectroscopy.
It is a simple process but a tedious boring process. So I created this sigmaplot
macro to handle all the files I wanted and graph the data.

Impdspec.jnb

[mautic type=”form” id=”6″]

 

You may use these programs freely. However, if you find these useful (or not) please let me know and I hope you would give credit. Thank you

ARTICLES

Can automation replace research and development?

Perhaps not … but it certainly can improve productivity, speeding up prototype development and helping to get your products to market faster.

This article highlights how an efficient knowledge management system had helped a client to

  1. improve their productivity,
  2. accelerate training of new members of the R&D team,
  3. and increase their intellectual property value.

Customized automated data processing tools and the ability to cross reference various sources of information allowed the client to organically maintain a dossier of its research and prototype development projects.

Customized solutions are necessary for each R&D department because the technology and scientific culture is unique to each group. In this case, we created software based on an open source web framework which granted the client the flexibility and freedom to modify the software to fit their future needs.

Here’s the full article: Can automation replace R&D?