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Shiva’s Status Update for 02/29

This week, I successfully programmed two Decawave anchors to transmit and receive data, then calculate distance via Two-Way Ranging over ultrawide-broadcast radio communication. This is mostly on schedule for our Gantt chart, but we did not anticipate having to calibrate the anchors. Tomorrow I will calibrate the anchors for more accurate distance calculations. Then we will be right on schedule again.

In the next week, my deliverable is to write the TDOA software to enable multiple anchors to receive a broadcast from a single tag, then pass the time of reception & tag ID to a central server program.

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Team Status Update for 02/22

This week has been one of setbacks and stalls. Rhea’s progress stalled due to illness and my own progress stalled due to technical difficulties. However, Rhea’s progress is more critical. She has fallen very far behind in terms of tag-anchor communication deliverables. This poses the most severe risk to the project.

To manage this risk, Udit and I will both be setting aside our previous deliverables to work with Rhea on tag-anchor communication. The current anchor-server network difficulties are primarily due to inbuilt issues with Linux, while the tag-anchor communication poses more complex challenges of understanding and implementing custom software. Therefore, we have deemed the anchor-server problems as lower priority to be solved later.

As a result of this, we have also scaled down our mean viable product. Our goal is to get one tag communicating with one anchor, presuming that we will be able to scale the tag-anchor and anchor-server networks up as needed. This change was required to keep the project manageable in the face of unforeseen difficulties while still delivering a viable product. Going forward, we will be aiming for more granular, design-focused deliverables to ensure incremental, consistent, and meaningful progress.

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Shiva’s Status Update for 02/22/20

This week, per the desired deliverables laid out in our team’s Gantt Chart, I successfully tested and demonstrated multi-anchor-server communication on February 17th. Unfortunately, I do not have video footage. Shortly after completing that deliverable, my second Raspberry Pi malfunctioned and became unable to connect to my local WiFi networks.  From February 18 through 19, I tried and failed to trouble-shoot this problem. It is still out of commission and so I cannot demonstrate multi-anchor-server communication because I do not have multiple functioning anchors.

As a result, I am currently behind on my next main deliverable:  a 1Mbps load test. I switched gears on February 20 and started writing code for the load test on a single Pi, but it needs to be debugged.

The Gantt chart will need to be redesigned this week. Rhea’s illness has caused her to fall behind.  Because my own work on anchor-server communication has only been slowed down by faulty equipment, I will be moving to assist Rhea with her work on tag-anchor communication:

As a result, the deliverables I want to accomplish in the next week are getting the tag to send pulses and the anchor to receive pulses. Once that is taken care of, I will be using some of the allotted slack time on my own schedule to catch up on the 1 MBPs load & field tests.

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Shiva’s Status Update for 02/15/20

This week, per the desired deliverables laid out in our team’s Gantt Chart, I researched network protocols, learned how to create a chat server and client network, and wrote programs for them in Python. I then successfully sent custom messages from a Raspberry Pi to a Macbook Pro over Wi-Fi.

Per the Gantt chart snap above, the project is slightly behind schedule. This is for two reasons. First, neither of the Raspberry Pi’s that were acquired last week did not post. I did not get my hands on a functioning Pi until this Monday, February 10th. Secondly, I flew into Boston on Sunday for a job interview on Monday, so could not get any work done those two days.

However, I anticipate getting back on schedule and completing my next deliverable, multi-anchor-server communication, by February 18th. This is because the chat server and client programs were designed from the start to support multiple connections. I recently got ahold of a second functioning Pi to test the multi-connection. After that, I want to complete the 1 MBPs load test deliverable by the 21st.