Another day in the lab.  First thing this morning, we found out that the original set of chips that we were going to test were most likely not going to work properly due to a mistake in the design, but Jean-Marie (the undergraduate fellow who designed them and has been basically directly in charge of watching out for us in the lab... she's like the intermediary between us and Dr. Pamela Abshire, the faculty sponsor) wanted us to look at the second copy of the chip just to make sure the data we were getting on Friday wasn't just because we had blown the circuit by something we were misinformed about.

So after we did our tests of that chip, it was clear that it was a problem with the chip design, so she had us move onto the second set of chips.  This second chip design is basically the completed version of the first set of chips.  Apparently what happened was that when it was time to send in a set of circuit designs to the company manufacturing them, she was only halfway done with her design, so she sent it in.  And then when she finished off the design and made revisions to it she sent it off again.  So theoretically this new set of chips should have fixed the mistakes that were in the first set of chips. 

So, we set it up and did a few quick test runs to make sure it would be working correctly.  And it was!  :)  About this time, we had to run off to get lunch so we could make it to our first RISE program training session (every Monday we have to attend a training session for our program).  This week the session was hosted by Lockheed-Martin and was titled "Successful Project Management"  It was supposed to help us understand the importance of a team and the stages a team goes through, as well as inform us of effective leadership styles and the role a project leader should take.  This is probably one of the most hands-on 'lecture'-type things I've ever been to.  They had little toys to help us remember key points.  For example, at one point of the presentation they were trying to emphasize 4 styles of leadership:  coaching, delegating, supporting and directing.  They gave us a little keychane with one of those little black boards that movie directors use... you know when they say... "Action!"  This was supposed to symbolize the directing style.  A second toy they gave us was a whistle to symbolize coaching.  Later in the presentation, they had us split up into 3 groups and each group had the same task of putting a puzzle together, but the method for going about it varied from group to group.  In one group, each member could pick out 2 pieces and put them together, and then as a group they came together and merged each set of pieces.  In my group, there were 5 roles... First there was the 'looker' who was only allowed to look at the pieces and talk - they couldn't use their hands.  The next was the 'pointer' who could only point at the piece that the looker was talking about, but could not talk.  Then there was the 'toucher' who could touch a piece of the puzzle, only after the pointer pointed at it, and also could not talk.  Only after a piece was touched could the 'mover' move the puzzle piece (also could not talk).  Then finally, the 'connector' could connect the piece to the rest of the puzzle after the mover moved it... and once again he could not talk.  So it was a very long drawn out process that made the completion of the puzzle very difficult.  The final group had basically the same structure given except that two people were involved in each role.  Also towards the end of the presentation they gave us little hand-clapper toys to remind us that it is important to reinforce and give feedback to members of our teams.  Anyway, it was a decent presentation which I could see would be very helpful for many individuals, but as a few of us from my lab group mentioned when we got back to our lab, we felt like a lot of the stuff they were saying we had heard before.

Anyway, when we got back to the lab we took a set of data so that Pamela could review it to make sure these new circuits were working... for some reason she had some reason to doubt that they were fully working.  It turns out that if the switches don't receive exactly 5 V of power they may not open fully and that means that when there theoretically should be no current flowing through the circuit, the switch is still close enough to being closed that a small amount of current (sub-threshold) is allowed to flow through the circuits... and since there are 14 of these switches, this current can be multiplied up to 14 times which ends up being a fairly significant amount of current.  Pamela just wanted to inspect things a little bit further before we moved forward with our work just to make sure that we weren't going to be wasting our time.  And by this decision was made it was just about 5:30 pm anyway, so she called it a day for us.  And so ends work day 6 of 50 in the RISE program.