The ADC makes more sense now. It turns out Professor Atkins has been waiting as we figured out that the weirdness we’ve run into is due to tremendous electromagnetic interference. My math GSI was incredibly kind and willing to spend about an hour helping me fix the statistics. I don’t know why the corruption I ran into was occurring, but we did establish that what GSL calls total sum of squares is actually variance. I’ve added a real TSS function, as well as an output of absolute value of residual. Here’s the best graphs we got previously, rendered with the latest graphing routine:
I didn’t want to disrupt the servo guy’s work much, so I moved Gumstix over to the power supply and set it back up. I didn’t use the breadboard to ground the unused ADCs, and put them all in the same alligator clip instead. I thought I would calibrate two more channels so that we’d have a usable input for the gyro reference voltage. I was very surprised with the results:
This makes so much more sense for many reasons. As I pointed out yesterday, there was a consistent, significant distortion under 1v. This is nowhere to be found in the new line. It’s actually a line, and there is only a minuscule difference in counts for the same voltages between graphs. This is acceptable as imperfections in the voltages we fed it as in this respect our power supply is… abstract. This line also goes up to 1024 at 2.5v, which is what it should actually do as it’s the maximum count at the maximum voltage. What I find amazing is how huge the effect of electromagnetic interference is! We got completely different information when using the breadboard, and even its imperfections were consistent! Professor Atkins revealed that she had let us spend hours on this fruitless calibration of electromagnetic interference so that we would thoroughly learn the importance of electromagnetically clean wiring. Lesson learned!