The Secret Life of a Mirror Cell

A couple of weeks ago, Wayne, Rob & I moved the collimated display over to Wayne's house. (I'll post pics of that soon)

Last week, Wayne did something that I feel stupid for not thinking of - he put a camera inside the mirror cell to show the process of the mirror formation from the INSIDE. It makes for a very cool video.

Collimating mirror draw-down from the inside - YouTube

It's kind of dark, but he did a great job annotating the interesting bits as they happen.

He's done a great job in tweaking the Arduino code to hold the mirror shape perfectly. We've abandoned the bleed-air system and use a Router speed controller to drive a shop vac (a Rigid ShopVac in Wayne's case).

Here's what the speed controller looks like:

http://www.geneb.org/images/speed-control-2.jpg

Yes, the image is huge. Sorry about that. :)

It's a bog standard speed controller being run by some custom cut gears and a Futaba R/C servo. Works FANTASTIC. Speed control is a LOT more quiet and easier to manage than the bleed air system.

g.