This week we worked on HW 1-3 and SW 1-2 from our new schedule made in order to put us back on track in time for demo. We ordered all our parts last week and weekend and were able to receive all the parts on time. Thus, Enock and Vrishab were able to work on testing the individual parts as they came as well as putting them together.
Txanton worked remotely on software programming for the VCO in which he had to write it for Arduino, MSP430, and STM32 since there were many issues with the Logic Level Converter and the MSP board. Txanton was able to zoom in remotely to help write the code in real-time for each of the boards as Enock and Vrishab tried debugging the boards and LLC.
For the hardware aspect the first goal was to set up GNU Radio and sync the SDR board which required some physical manipulation of the PCB’s to get the clocks to sync. Once the FM signals could be seen simultaneously the next step as to check the VCO output to ensure the correct sine wave was seen. After this was done all of the parts ended up coming in tandem and thus we were able to start physically building the entire system.
Fitting the SDR, VCO, LLC, and microcontroller it was seen that the LLC could not switch fast enough for the SPI Interface of the Arduino. Thus the arduino was switched out to the MSP which was natively 3.3V and allowed for us to remove the LLC from the design however, we could not verify that the VCO was working properly and thus we switched to the STM32 which Txanton had extensive experience with. This board worked and so we finally attached the downmixer to the WiFi antenna and tested with GNURadio, a hotspot, and a laptop connected to the hotspot to see that this signal was seen in the waterfall. We were able to see good signal strength when close to the antenna and much weaker when moved away, especially out of FOV and so we concluded that the system worked.
The next steps will be for Txanton to start working on OpenCV code for webcam input and overlay. The beamforming algorithm will need to be configured with GNURadio data from the antennas and will need to be optimized and changed once we see what this data will look like.
Here is part of the system. Antennas and downmixer not shown but attached out of the FOV.
