This week we spent a lot of time watching our peers present their own projects which helped us to get a good idea of how other groups were approaching their own challenges and try to find ways we can adapt that to our own.
We did not get as much done this week as we would have liked due to the project presentations, however we still were able to get a solid start on our requirements. Since we decided on cylindrical antenna’s we started to try and address the challenge of how to make sure they stay in a consistent arrangement with proper angles between each antenna. Our solution for this was a 3D printed rigid body in order to keep all of the antenna’s in place. We also did research on different digital beamforming algorithms so that we may start comparing and contrasting them to see if they meet our near real-time constraints and their difficulty in implementation.
Going forward, we plan to focus our attention towards the antenna’s and the PCB that all of the antenna’s will connect to. By focusing on this it will allow us to get prepared to start ordering components so that we may start working on our physical implementation and start prototyping as soon as possible. We will also start organizing our information regarding DSP algorithms so that we can get an idea of how we will implement them. We will also need to make a decision regarding whether or not we will use a Software Defined Radio, such as GNU Radio, or if we will use a FPGA instead as they both have benefits and drawbacks.