This week I spent a long time trying to narrow the scope of our project and critiquing the different parts of our approach. We had a very broad sense of the purpose our project with no definitive and interesting use cases which led to making a weak argument for our project. From this I was able to come up with very specific use cases that would be used in the realm of security and police enforcement since this was one of the important parts for pitching our idea.
Together, we were able to decide that we would localize WiFi devices in a standard bedroom sized area. I deduced that 1Hz response would be a reasonable target metric for real-time detection so I looked into FPGA’s that could support the signal processing. Some FPGA’s that could be used are the Zynq Ultra96 v2 and Terasic DE10-Nano since they are relatively cheap, easy to work with, and I have experience using the two devices. Their form factor is quite small and light and so it fits with our design in terms of size and mobility since it isn’t too heavy.
Lastly I spent time trying to narrow our testing methods so that they were specific metrics that would address some of our technical challenges and goals mentioned during the presentation. One thing that we will need to work on, however, is determining a specific number of devices to locate since we were very general with our proposal and only determined lobe-width.
In addition to determining how many devices to locate, I will start working on looking to signal processing modules that we can use in conjunction with the algorithms we will be using. Finding IP’s will make the programming part much easier and will allow us to interface with the embedded parts smoother so that we don’t have to write our own algorithms/interfaces.