Week 6: Continuing Trials and Working Independently

Welcome back to my senior project blog! This week, I continued with experimental trials and building consistency in my data collection. With my system now fully set up, my main focus was on maintaining a steady collection process and making sure that my trials were being conducted under controlled and repeatable conditions.

Since my external advisor was not available this week, I had to focus more on my own skills and judgment to move forward. At first, this felt a bit challenging, especially when making decisions about how to structure my trials and adjust certain parts of the setup (I didn’t want to break anything). However, as the week progressed, I became more confident in my ability to manage the process independently and troubleshoot any issues that came up.

A large part of my time was spent running temperature-controlled trials inside the environmental chamber. I worked on carefully stepping through different temperature conditions, allowing enough time for the system to stabilize before recording any new measurements. I paid close attention to consistency between trials, making sure that my procedures remained the same each time to reduce variability in the data.

During this process, I encountered another small issue related to data logging. At certain points, I noticed that some of my recorded values were not being saved properly, which interrupted a few of my trial runs. After checking the system, I realized this was due to a minor configuration issue with the data logger. I had to redo these trials, so that took almost a full day, but I was able to fix this relatively quickly and continued my trials without further problems.

In addition to running trials, I also spent time organizing the data I have collected so far and reviewing my workflow to identify areas for improvement. As I continue collecting more data, maintaining organization will be important to make sure that my analysis phase is efficient and accurate.

Overall, Week 6 was focused on consistency and independence. Without direct guidance from my advisor, I was able to continue making steady progress and build confidence in managing my experimental process on my own. Moving forward, I plan to continue running additional trials and refining my setup so that I can gather a complete and reliable dataset for analysis. I hope to start on humidity trials soon, and get more IR camera readings by Week 8.