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[AZeitung]

I hope this is an ok place to ask this question. I've found a bit of information on google, but since I'm not really a programmer I was hoping I could get some more specific information here.

I've finished 3 years of grad school in physics, and my research is in computational physics. All through high school I used to do a bit of 3D game programming just for fun. Because of this, my uncle, who runs a forensic chemistry lab, asked me to do some work for him at the beginning of the summer, since I have a little bit of free time.

Regardless of the answers I get here, I'm not going to charge him too much, since its for family, and since it's a system that they might potentially sell some day, and if they do, I would get a (small) percentage of the sales. I'm just wondering how much a job like this would typically pay.

I need to write a program that will measure the refractive index of glass for identification purposes. I need to:

1) Control a mettler hot stage controller, which connects to the computer via serial port (and I'm using a serial port to USB converter).
2) Display video from a digital camera
3) Allow users to select regions of the video for analysis as the temperature changes.
4) Develop algorthims for edge/contrast detection to determine refractive index match points.
5) Plot and interpolate data.
5) Make a nice user interface that matches someone else's vision of what the program should look like.
6) Add other features for writing and storing reports and data.

I've already done quite a bit of work on this. I can control the hot stage through USB, display video using direct show, the user can select regions with mouse clicks, and I've been working on algorithms for edge and contrast detection, although none of them perform quite as well as they need to to measure the refractive index with sufficient accuracy. It also plots and interpolates the data.

It's taken me two weeks to get this far, and there are certain things that I know someone with more experience with certain apects of programming would have been able to do faster (it took me an entire day to figure out that I needed to use the video mixing renderer to draw on top of a direct show window, since I had never used direct show, or worked with video at all prior to this project).

But just out of curiosity, how much would a job like this typically pay per hour?

[WingedPanther]

It depends heavily on the situation. As an individual programmer, $20/hour+ isn't unreasonable, but for family I can see dropping down to $15. I would NOT go below $10.