The DUX is alive, connected, and sending physical resonance observations into POPChain. That is exciting—but the best part of this stage is how much I am learning about what those observations actually mean.
I have started working through a proper resonance-testing checklist by hand. It covers the identity of each run, the device and firmware revisions, the physical fixture, drive and sense paths, ADC settings, cable routing, grounding, temperature, frequency sweeps, I/Q measurements, phase, amplitude, bandwidth, Q factor, raw channel capture, and anything unusual that happens along the way.
Going through it carefully has already made the work clearer. A number is not the whole experiment. A resonance peak needs its conditions, its measurement method, its limitations, and enough evidence for somebody—including future me—to understand how it was produced.
I am also learning to separate things that initially sounded interchangeable. Lock-in magnitude is not automatically RMS. Sweep bandwidth is not ring-down. The quadrature channel called Q is not the same thing as resonance Q-factor. A valid observation does not need to be discarded because it belongs to a different mode, but it should not be called verified until we understand its place in the spectral map.
That is why I am printing the checklist and making thorough handwritten records. The machine can preserve timestamps, telemetry and evidence digests; I can record the physical context—the position of the device, what touched it, the cable route, the room, the temperature, and what I noticed while the test was happening.
This feels like the right kind of progress. The system is running, the measurements are arriving, and I am not just copying a procedure. I am learning how the instrument works well enough to test it properly, question it honestly, and build a spectral record we can trust.