Enock’s Status Report for 02/20/2021

This week I focused on deciding on what kind of hardware we would try to do some of the signal processing and programming intensive computations. Within the budget and availability I found the Zynq Ultra96 v2 board would be the best in terms of price, size, and ease of use. This board is used in 18-643 so we are hoping to be able to borrow a board if possible. If we use Vivado it will be very easy to use existing IP blocks that will allow for us to use modules that will interface with certain components or that will do certain DSP computations without having to write our own in SystemVerilog. Furthermore the board is an MPSoC which allows for us to write certain parts in C++ and to establish a separate workflow for those who will be working on the programming side and those working on the hardware side (aka Verilog). Aside from this I decided it might be a good idea to focus on LTE signals rather than WiFi since it is more common for devices to be transmitting/receiving LTE than WiFi so from a security standpoint it might catch more users with this frequency. This, however, may limit our testing capabilities since we will have less devices with LTE compared to WiFi enabled devices. I hope to be able to find out if we can use this board in our project as well as if we will have enough testing data to use LTE as our base signal.