Chickens Bertha is making a good recovery! I was so worried for her before I left, but now she's eating well and gaining weight a little bit at a time. She came with me to lab on Monday and seemed to enjoy it so I think she'll be making more visits in the future. Research My presentation went really well and several people had interesting questions afterward! It's nice to feel like other people find it interesting and valuable, since I worry a lot about both of those things. I am supposed to take my comprehensive exam (like a thesis defense, but before you've written the thesis) this semester but there are three and a half weeks left in it and my advisor wants me to get two more papers out the door before I do the exam. I have been treating research more as a 9-5 job than a lifestyle and I think I am going to have to start working harder if I ever want to get out. We'll see if my mental health will tolerate that.
Just realized you can't even see the actual soldering station so you probably meant the rack of test equipment :) It's "general lab stuff" -- old oscilloscope (which I think the trigger is messed up on? I need to investigate), a few power supplies, and a signal generator. I'd like a nice multimeter and a logic analyzer too but I haven't had reason to ask for them yet. Maybe soon, though, if things keep up this way. One of the other research groups I work with works at the university's "electromagnetic compatibility" lab which is about half a warehouse out in the middle of nowhere and goddamn do they have some fancy stuff out there.
Thanks! It's an import but it gets the job done just fine so I have no material complaints with it. It's for "science" -- sometimes my lab does hardware-heavy projects so we use it for assembly/modifications/rework/etc. There's also a nice reflow oven next door if we need to make any surface-mount boards. Here we're using it to make some shielding boxes for a serial communications link that needs to happily survive a test chamber that can produce electric fields up to 175 kV/m -- so what would normally be a pair of wires attached to a board is now a fiber-optic transceiver, a big shielding box with ferrites on all the data and power lines, and three coax lines carrying power, transmit, and receive to the actual device in the test chamber.