I've been busy as a one armed hat rack for over a month now and haven't taken much time to work on this project.  Finally, I was able to spend some quality time with the interferometer over the three day weekend.  I have created a new flowchart of how the software will interact with the interferometer, and I rewrote some of the older i2c code, now that I have learned some new tricks.

Anyway, last night after writing c code and a shell script, I was able to have the Zipit calculating the index of refraction of light once every six seconds.  after a little more scripting, I was able to transmit the updated index of refraction to the interferometer.

To my delight, I saw that the interferometer began to agree with my digital caliper across it's total range.