This week was a hardware heavy week in which we finally got all our parts. The beginning part of this weekend was spent working setting up our GNURadio environment on Linux as well as the companion to use the SDR’s. Afterwards I spent time trying to configure the SDR’s to be synced and placed two of them in close proximity connected via a USB Hub to my computer to verify we could see FM radio signals of the two at the same time. At the time we had two antennas one longer than the other which produced a stronger reception as shown in the waterfall. This was the first milestone goal that we hit which was to: setup the SDR/GNU Radio environment, sync the SDRs, and see the signals in the companion app.
The next goals were all related to testing when the parts came in. Initially we received SMA cables which could not connect to our antennas so we put in an order for SMA to RPSMA adapters which fixed our issue.
Upon receiving the VCO I was able to test and verify that the output signal was a sine wave with an oscilloscope.
We decided to use an arduino to do setup processes for the VCO registers which has 5V data line outputs which would be intercepted by the Logic Level Converter and sent to the VCO but we could not see the proper voltage outputs which was related to the LLC not capturing at a fast enough rate due to the high SPI output rate. Thus we tried using a MSP430 which ended up not working and thus we settled on using the STM32 instead which natively had 3.3V output and we could phase out the LLC from our design.
When verifying that the STM was properly configured we attached the antenna to the downmixer and the downmixer to the VCO and SDR To verify we could see WiFi signals on GNURadio waterfall. This proved to be a success.
Next week’s goal will be to configure and optimize the beamforming algorithm depending on how the data is transmitted now that we are able to capture.