Class of 2008
Major: Electrical and Computer Engineering
Project Center: Silicon Valley, California
Major Qualifying Project: An automated system to allow researchers in Silicon Valley, California to operate remotely an optical telescope located in Alaska.
Tom Niemczycki
March 3, 2008
It’s a bit ironic that about a year ago I wrote a blog entry about visiting the Prime Meridian at the Greenwich Observatory; last week I wasn’t all that far from the International Date Line. Well, that might be an overstatement, but my MQP team actually travelled to the sub-Arctic wilderness of Alaska to deploy and test our telescope automation system. I’m also very relieved to be able to say that we have a working project! But wait, we still have to finish the report and give a presentation...
The first thing that struck me about Alaska was the mountains. Endless mountain ranges surround you from the moment you step off the plane in Anchorage. Even though I’m a huge tourist and I love discovering new places, I never expected to be so impressed by Alaska. I made the mistake of imagining a cold and icy wasteland; how wrong I was!
First, let me tell you a bit about this trip since it was rather unexpected. Since we arrived in California, our project lead has been trying to secure a grant and approval for our project team to go to HAARP and interact with the equipment in person. Thanks to her time and effort, we had a great opportunity to do just that and discover an amazing new world at the same time.
HAARP is located just outside a little village called Gakona. By "village" I really mean a few houses scattered down a few miles of road. Their addresses are determined by the nearest mile markers. We stayed at a bed & breakfast along the Copper River. The main lodge was adorned with trophies of bears, foxes, caribou, sheep, fish, and even a walrus. I was hoping to spot some live wildlife as well, though we only saw a rabbit, fox, and eagle.
Incredible valleys form flat lands that stretch for miles until they get interrupted by the most massive mountains I have ever seen. The pine trees here are all short with really thin trunks - apparently because the soil gets really soft in the summer - but the forests are incredibly thick nonetheless. The night is perfectly black except for the countless stars in the sky - definitely more than I have ever seen before. I hoped to see the northern lights while up there, but apparently February of 2008 is the lowest point in an eleven year cycle of solar activity. I guess that just means I will have to come back in a few years.
Nighttime temperatures readily fell below zero degrees, and daytime temperatures barely broke into the twenties. But Alaska had a unique charm that I find irresistible. The friendliness of the locals, the culture of living off the land, and the incredible scenery all entice me to visit when I can really explore. For now, I was just there to get the job done.
It has been my experience in completing engineering projects over the last four years that in every project there comes a special moment that determines the outcome. At this point, all the pieces have been assembled and put into place, and all that is left is to turn everything on at once and see it come to life as all the components being to work in harmony. Very often it is at this precise moment, if all the interfaces have been designed properly, that the whole project will either progress into a working prototype, or fall apart and never really work correctly in the end. The one factor that determines which happens seems to be whether the engineer is willing to put everything else aside to relentlessly troubleshoot the hidden bugs that emerge one by one.
Distractions like sleep take a backseat as you accelerate toward demonstrating the prototype. You work in a furious cycle of testing, analyzing, tweaking, implementing, and testing again and again, and a thousand more times. And in one of those cycles, suddenly all the pieces begin working flawlessly, and the components that you dreamed up weeks or months ago simply do exactly what you intended. This experience is the single greatest joy an engineer can have in his profession. It also means that you can go home and sleep. You have to break through this point at some point, and the sooner you do it the better the project will be.
Last week we did just that. After weeks of designing components and interfaces, we got to the site and hit roadblocks almost immediately. The web server wouldn’t work in the configuration we had prepared, the code for the cameras didn’t work, and the algorithms we developed to display images just produced junk. It’s easy to start panicking in that situation, but for the sake of team unity everyone had to focus on finding solutions. We started tackling the problems one by one, rewriting code, performing hundreds of tests. Wednesday night was long, but by Thursday or Friday we had it. All the pieces were in place and working together. We switched from rushing to get it done to noting little things we could improve to make it better, and taking a few moments to sit back and enjoy watching it work.
On Saturday night we even had the opportunity to use our system to gather real data. Our project lead, who had left Alaska a day earlier, took the controls from California and started imaging completely without the team’s intervention. That gave us a pretty great feeling about the outcome of the project; I think we were all proud of our work.
Now all that’s left is to wrap it up, and call it done. We’re ironing out a few minor bugs this week in addition to documenting all the technical details in a report. We also have to give a presentation on Wednesday, but the slides are almost done. It was good to know that the project is working, but it’s even better knowing that the end is so near.
