This week we researched directional antennas and accompanying boards. We were looking for antennas that were small enough that could fit on our device and strong enough directionality for our purposes. We looked at EE forums to find one that would suit our use case. We then searched for these products on Amazon. We considered multiple approaches on how to get the RSSI. One idea was multiplexing between antennas, but this might result in higher latency. We arrived on individual ESP32 based boards, one per antenna, these act like Arduinos so we can get RSSI from existing libraries.
With the single computational unit, RSSI retrieval of the several directional antennas will happen sequentially. So a risk that we have discussed at this stage is latency when computing RSSI. Our risk mitigation plan for this issue is to implement a multithreading system or reduce the number of antennas.
No design changes or schedule changes so far. We are on track, contingent on the materials we ordered working for our project.