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Charles Chung - Week 2


Bane, Joker and Penguin.

On Monday, I helped David move his equipment from his car to the lab. Those were the names of the high-speed cameras he used for the Costa Rica trip. The appropriately named Batman villains, as well as the bat soft toys around the room, welcomed me into the second week of the lab. 


For the first three days, I worked on more digitizing – except this time, I ran the trial from start to the final edit process. I had to calibrate the xma files before I could digitize properly. I did this by choosing around 30 good photos from the 900 from the stacked JPG of the chessboard video and digitized those on the three cameras: B, J and P. Before each set of trials, David waved a chessboard with certain black and white tiles before the cameras. This allows XMALAB to accurately represent x-y-z coordinates in relation to the points that I click for digitizing. Then, I ran 100,000 calibration iterations, which took around 4 hours.

While the calibrations were going on, David brought me for a bat dissection in the anatomy room Monday afternoon (too graphic for photos!) I learned about muscles in charge of flight as well as how they looked like on bats. This led well into Wednesday’s lab meeting where I was able to answer a few questions on bat anatomy.  

On Thursday and Friday, David was out of town. I worked on a new project in the comfort of my Airbnb: analyzing the impact forces for all 50 trials with successful landings. The impact forces on the force plate was separated into Ftot (total force), Fx (vertical force), Fy (lateral force) and Fz (Force into plate). I analyzed the impact forces using MATLAB code and put all the numbers into an excel spreadsheet.

Apart from the science, David had recommended me to visit a donuts store half an hour away from campus. It was a Rhode Island specialty and we went Friday afternoon. The donuts were next level (I didn’t even take a photo of them, oops.)
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