Presentation
This week, I presented our project progress in our Section C presentations. This took some considerable effort, both in terms of designing the slide deck and performing dry runs of the presentation beforehand. The feedback from the presentation was useful and will help clarify some of the portions of our design review in the coming weeks.
Meeting with Shaun Stevens (Dr. Kim’s Grad Student)
We met with Shaun to discuss the specifics of our antenna design and signal processing pipeline implementation. He gave us some extremely valuable feedback, which has changed some aspects of our design. We are now going to be downconverting the collected WiFi signals from 2.4 GHz to baseband, and we will then sample the downconverted signal at a correspondingly lower rate. Performing these steps will require a voltage-controlled oscillator, the make and model of which we have already identified. Adding the oscillator to our system has incurred a slight delay in our progress, but has actually had the effect of speeding development since we won’t have to sample the signal at 4.8 GHz (which was something that we had planned on taking a week to figure out).
Progress Since Last Week
Last week we stated that we would begin on the PCB design. Txanton has been heavily focused on this, and we are on track to finish the layout and meet with Dr. Carley for review within the coming week. I have been aiding in some aspects of the PCB design, specifically with the selection of some of the components.
Plans for Next Week
We plan to have the PCB layout completed and will meet with Dr. Carley to verify that our design will work. We will then send the specs out to have our board fabricated and shipped back.