One of the big goals for this visit to LCO was to troubleshoot a coupled pair of actuators on our precious 2040 actuator “tweeter” deformable mirror (DM). Being coupled meant that when we poked actuator 498, actuator 650 moved (not 498). Actuator 650 also moved when we poked 650. We first noticed this problem after shipping MagAO-X in March, when we ran a post-cabling function test. However, digging through our archives we found that it showed up back in November, 2023, but we just didn’t notice.
Now our tweeter is expensive. So we don’t like it when things go wrong, and it makes messing with it really stressful. But having those two actuators acting up means MagAO-X didn’t work perfectly, so we had to do what we can to fix it. We deferred it until after our March and April runs to give us time to plan and do it right.
We can all breathe a sigh of relief: with only minimal shenanigans we got it fixed. After testing various potential cabling problems, we found that a circuit board just needed to be replaced. We had a spare, popped it in, and the couple had split up and gone back to behaving normally.
And we got that done in time for Empanada Sunday:
After lunch we got onto the next set of tasks, which included disassembling a rack shelf so we can get better airflow.
We’re also upgrading the Instrument Control Computer (ICC) to go faster and do more stuff. We like to liquid cool our CPUs and GPUs. Normally we rig that up in Tucson, but we couldn’t get all of the components from our usual supplier in time, so we shipped what we had (and found some substitutes on Amazon!) and are doing some clean room plumbing.
Jay has also been leading the assembly and testing of new ICC. Other than the liquid cooling parts, it was fully working in Tucson before we took it apart to ship it down here. We’re getting it all back together.
Even after our delayed departure, we are making good time thanks to the relatively easy fix to the tweeter. I haven’t had enough running on this trip yet, so I took some time before dinner to go circle around the 100″.
