To give some background to those of you who don't know what I am talking about, I will briefly describe to you the circumstances leading up to this point. Last semester (spring of 2009), I had a project for my class "Principles of Engineering", that project was to send a sensor up in a high altitude balloon that would reach near space, and then analyze the data. My sensor was a scintillator. We sent it up. It didn't work. High voltage caused arcing and everything died (or at least it seemed that way). I still needed data and so I worked 48 hours in one week trying to get this circuit to work. It didn't. It even turns out that my professor actually made another circuit for me, but never told me. Needless to say, I hated that thing, and was glad when it was over.
Fast forward to today, last week of work for the summer (at least for this project). My boss, who coincidentally was the professor I had for Principles, comes up to me and wants me to make a scintillator circuit...yeah...but not just any circuit, he wants me to use my old one...the one that never worked. He is well-meaning, and didn't know all the grief that bloody circuit gave me, but I am sure he could tell I was extremely agitated no matter how hard I tried to hide it.
Good news is that I finally got this thing to work-ish after 8 hours of hard work. Turns out (and I suspected this, but never was given new parts) that the original arcing on the circuit fried the op-amp, and microprocessor - two vital components. I guess thats what happens when 1000 volts gets pumped into circuitry that is only meant to handle 5 volts. Now I just need to get new chips for it, and it should work...then take it off the bread board and solder it...BLEAH.
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