Day 18: Error 22

This morning, I woke up and walked to the lab expecting to not do anything but wait for parts the entire day. But in the morning, Peco and I asked Emily about it and she showed us a cabinet of old cables. And lo and behold, what did we find in that cabinet?

That’s right: The cable we needed. It had the right adapter to connect to the ion beam’s plug, and wires sticking out the other end. We went to Chris, a BU technician staff, hoping to find the other piece, but he searched for hours and couldn’t find it. He said he’d have it in his office by Friday (through ordering).

We didn’t want to have to wait until Friday, so we attempted the last-resort action: detaching the plug from one of our out-of-use roughing pumps. The screws were threaded, so using screwdrivers to install and uninstall the wires from the plugs was extremely annoying. In total, finding the parts, detaching, and reassembling took about three hours. By the time we were finished, it was 4:45 pm.

We were really happy because the final cable was connected! When we started the machine, all the displays were working perfectly. But when we turned on the ion beam to start collecting data, the system threw an error: Error 22. We spent a few minutes digging through the manual to find the error’s meaning, and read:

FATAL ERROR
Case 1: The ion beam filament is broken.
Case 2: The cables are disconnected.

The first thing we did was check the connections inside the chamber — the squid wires I talked about earlier (that I attached with Emily), 7 in total. They all seemed to be connected. Then we checked the connections on the outside of the chamber, and they all seemed to be connected. The only solution seemed to be to bring the vacuum back up to atmospheric pressure and inspect the filament and even though we really didn’t want to do that (it would delay our project for two days), things were looking pretty grim.

Peco and Emily were seriously considering venting the chamber (bringing it back up to atmospheric pressure), and were about to start the process. In a last ditch attempt, I meticulously checked the cables again. I checked the inner connections, the outer connections, and then I followed the huge cable leading from the top of the chamber (where the 7 wires converged into one jacket). When I reached the end of that, I asked: why isn’t this plug connected to anything?

The last thing anyone would have expected was for literally the largest cable in the entire contraption to not be connected to its controller box, literally an inch away. While transporting the device, we had zip tied the plug to the rack. We all breathed a sigh of relief, and I felt really accomplished because I felt like that was a pretty big contribution. Imagine if we vented the chamber only to find that the filament was still intact, and then saw that the huge wire was disconnected. How sad would that be? Anywas, after we solved that problem, it was nearly 6:00 pm, and we called it a day and headed home.

So that was the highlight of my day. I wanted to work on college essays, but I ended up crashing on my bed and falling asleep for around 3 hours. I had a dream that was kind of interesting, and I’ll include it in the Random things section. I woke up at 10:30 pm, went to the 11:00 pm curfew meeting, and now I’m here. I got distracted a math problem for some time, so now I’m trying to rapidly finish this blog post so I can get some sleep in.

That’s what happened today. I’m nearly positive we will be able to start collecting data tomorrow, so I’m excited for that! (How many times have I said this already?) No guarantees though, so don’t be disappointed if some other error shows up and we waste time solving that.

Sayonara?
Max

Random things:

• thinking of goodbyes before I sign off has become increasingly stressful day by day just because I hate repeating myself.
• my dream: I was being chased by a mob of security-guard-looking men through the streets of some huge city. The interesting thing was that as we walked by the security guards, they didn’t do anything until we started feeling paranoid. They wouldn’t chase us unless we feared them to. At least that’s what I remember — sorry if that didn’t make sense.
• https://artofproblemsolving.com/community/c6h1480157_imo_2017_problem_3 if you’re interested in the problem I got distracted by.