Introduction: Welcome to Garrett Fitzgerald’s Senior Project

Welcome! This blog site will serve as an online benchmark for my senior project in Computer Engineering, to be completed over the fall and winter terms of the ’17-’18.

My senior project is titled ‘AFM tip impulse response in attractive and repulsive regimes‘. It is the main goal of this project to develop a reusable software module which will allow for a systematic study of the AFM tip’s impulse response in attractive and repulsive regimes. The project is aimed to be completed in two phases over the course of the two terms.

The work done in fall term will be in accordance with the CpE department’s guidelines, which will culminate in making a detailed design report. The software module will be heavily developed this term. The winter term will see the completion of the software module and a thorough testing of the system.

Overall, this project poses many challenges as it has a wide breadth of topic areas which must be understood. At a high level software development will be completed with a relatively sparsely used and documented programming language, IGOR in tandem with low level built in functions specific to the Asylum MFP-3D AFM. Past the software challenges, the project will require physics and signal processing analysis in order to define and output correct waveforms for component excitation.

This project will  be a challenge and I look forward to put my best foot forward in this senior project!