Week 3

The better part of this week was spent designing, assembling and perfecting a wooden U-mount to serve as a holder for the tachometer's emitter and diode, as pictured below. Despite slight warping in the wood and refraction by the bulb, the array is able to detect the minute interruptions in the laser perfectly.

From this setup, I received the following time series, with the anticipated results in magenta, and the actual results in blue. Although it fit the general prediction well, there is a great deal of temporal aliasing , as well as an unexplained dip near the 32 second mark. The temporal aliasing is a result of a sample rate smaller that that of the signal, leading to discretized, 'jumpy' data. It can be minimized by aggressive smoothing algorithms, which run the risk of being too reductive.