Add slow_bend post.

[blog.git] / posts / slow_bend.mdwn

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+[[!meta  title="slow_bend"]]
+
+In the course of my [[research|Thesis]], I've spend a good deal of
+time developing clean, Python interfaces to much of our lab equipment.
+I also tend to have strong opinions on the One True Way® to solve a
+problem.  This means that I occasionaly end up writing script to run
+other people's experiment, especially when they don't take all that
+much time to write.
+
+I wrote `slow_bend` for Liming Zhao, who was a postdoc in our lab
+from 2008 to 2010.  Liming coated one side of an AFM cantilever with a
+film of cellulose and used [[slow_bend.py]] (version 0.2) to monitor
+the cantilever deflection as he flushed in different buffers
+([paper]).  Unfortunately, the paper claims the data aquisition was
+carried out in LabView.
+
+`slow_bend` is not a complicated program; it polls analog input
+channels using [[pycomedi]] (and optionally reads temperatures using
+backends from [[pypid]]).  The polling continues until `slow_bend`
+recieves a [KeyboardInterrupt][].
+
+    $ slow_bend.py --version
+    0.4
+    $ slow_bend.py 0 3
+    #time (second)     chan 0 (bit)    chan 0 (volt)   chan 3 (bit)    chan 3 (volt)
+    1.81198e-05        34727   0.598001        39679   2.10925
+    4.00409    34956   0.667887        38033   1.60693
+    8.00408    35074   0.703899        36780   1.22454
+    12.0041    35041   0.693828        35814   0.929732
+    16.0041    34917   0.655985        35044   0.694743
+    ^C
+
+[paper]: http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/bit.22754
+[KeyboardInterrupt]: http://docs.python.org/library/exceptions.html#exceptions.KeyboardInterrupt
+
+[[!tag tags/code]]
+[[!tag tags/python]]