This week, I focused on two main tasks. Firstly, leading up the design phase of our Capstone, we had to begin ordering materials to begin testing our antenna approach. Specifically, after group discussions about how we should have the antennas interfacing with the main compute (to be able to grab RSSI), I researched online for a WiFi capable chip that not only had an external antenna connector (such that we could connect our directional antenna to it), but also a serial interface over USB for easy programming and debugging. Importantly, it had to be able to get the RSSI of the WiFi signal so that we can plug in our directional antennas, and sense the signal strength. We landed on an ESP32 board with a physical micro antenna connector (it comes with a converted to an RP-SMA connector) , and a USB serial board that hooks onto it. I submitted the order forms for this as well as the Antenna.
After we got feedback about our proposal presentation on Wednesday, I read through it and started looking into the NRF24L01 board suggested by the instructors as a possible alternative to the WiFi approach we laid out in our proposal.