The major accomplishment I made this week was getting a first draft of the RESQUBE software halfway completed, with many of the features already completed. The specific milestones I accomplished were that I got a development environment fully set up, with the process to create the environment documented. Then, I setup the team’s GitHub repo for all of our code and project files. Next, I made a trial software using Thread for the mesh network, which worked, but didn’t include seamless integration of phone and firefighter tablet connections. I then did research, and landed upon ESP-MESH-LITE, a library that runs a mesh network over 2.4GHz WiFi, with support for custom access points and routing. I got the basic access point setup, and added features like node connection swapping, where the connected devices swap to a different node in the mesh based on signal strength (RSSI). I then performed testing with that system over 2 nodes, with connections to my laptop and my phone and dynamic IP allocation and connection switching. Then, I soldered the battery to one of the SEEED XIAO microcontrollers to test charging and battery life, which seemed to work well with adequate runtime exceeding our MVP design requirements, even during active communications and data transfers. What is left to do is fully flesh out inter-node routing, as each node acts as its own gateway, with its own subnet, and there is currently no way for packets from one subnet/node to reach another subnet/node while getting routed properly. This is required for allowing the victim to communicate with the firefighter and vice-versa over the mesh network. Given this progress, I believe I am either on or ahead of schedule, as the software development had been progressing fast.
