What's all the fuss about?

"Project?  Tell me about this project." you say?  Well I could, but then I'd have to kill you torture you until you signed a secrecy agreement.  No, seriously, this project is part of my PhD research but also an embodiment of an invention and I'm trying not to start the one-year-after-public-disclosure countdown just yet.  It wouldn't be the end of the world, but there's no reason to disclose any proprietary ideas here.  Trust me, there will be plenty left to write about.  [And if you have insider information on this, please refrain from revealing any additional information in your comments.]

Expect this series to be VERY technical.  I'll try not to let it get boring, maybe even add a little humor here and there (although you may be tempted to argue my definition of funny every now and then), but stay pretty focused and be quite prolific and maybe terse at times because I don't want my blog writing to set the timeline.

What's that I hear?  "Get to the project already!"  I did promise to tell you what all of this is about, didn't I?

Succinctly, the invention makes use of periodic step changes in the pressure of a pneumatic system.  Currently that means that the postdocs who work with me in the lab (an awesome couple from Brazil who have been extremely patient with me even though I'm very much their junior yet create a lot of extra work for them) have to turn several stopcocks by hand several time for each measurement.  [I'll briefly introduce the lab and the purpose of the research we do in a future post.]  There are quite a few advantages to automatic pressure control:

• The surgeons' time is a very limited resource which can't be increased because the surgery table is cramped.
• Our lab is blessed with postdocs who are way above average skill and intelligence and enthusiastic about research.  Eventually this method has to undergo broader testing among people who will require convincing just to let a fully automated system be used.
• People just aren't good at doing things on a sub-second schedule.  So there's a significant amount of variation in execution, which translates into additional uncertainty in the results.

For these reasons I intend to unleash the intense unerring attentions of Cylons The Borg an ARM7 microcontroller to relentlessly pursue accurate timing.  So the foreseeable future will see posts discussing how to build an embedded pneumatic control system with data collection capabilities in a small package with long battery life which is easy to use, accurate, and above all safe.  And for good measure, also try to be flexible enough to take care of some of the other highly repetitive timing critical tasks which are performed by hand in and around the lab today.