This week, in preparation for our Design proposal presentation (which I will be presenting), I helped with some of the content on the slides while also preparing what I should say. I wrote notes for each slide in the form of main points, and rehearsed the presentation multiple times. On the technical slide of the project, I helped program the ESP32 board, and connect it with our new directional antenna to find out if direction sensing can work using our approach. This involved setting up the Arduino IDE to work with the ESP32-CAM board, and using the WiFi library to gather RSSI data.
I helped run some preliminary sanity checks indoors to see if the Antenna was behaving as expected. We then moved outside where I helped collect the RSSI data for different test cases of our antenna (such as different angles of the WiFi beacon from the antenna, different distances from antenna, as well as orientation and tilt of the antenna). I then moved this data to Excel and plotted it to find out if there was a discernable peak in one direction so we can use it for direction finding. We ultimately found that there is a peak of signal strength of around 30 degrees when the antenna is placed horizontally, and that it had enough resolution such that we could tell the RSSI peak from around 30 feet away until right up to the antenna. Now that we have obtained this data, I am starting to think about the specifics of the propulsion algorithm that will take the antenna’s RSSI data to output various PWM values for each of the motors. My team also suggested that we may need to consider a filter to pre-process the data.
When the parachute and motors arrive next week, we will begin testing drop speeds, motor thrust as well as do additional testing on the antenna in different configuration