This week Vrishab and I spent time on the real time signal processing in time for demo. Through this we were able to start programming and finishing the antenna capture design,
For real time processing we were able to write python classes and functions that interfaced with GNURadio such that we were able to capture real-time daata and send it through UDP so that this data could be processed. We were able to set it up such that the laptop (Macbook) acted as the client and the antennas (surface tablet/SDRs) acted as the server such that the server would send the collected data from the servers to the client which would do all the processing for the correlation and angle of arrival data.
However, we faced issues with the hardware as we had two SDR’s running but during real-time analysis of the QT data we noticed that one signal was always more noisy and less strong than the other which ended up having to do with our downmixer. This was discovered by switching out the SMA cable, SMA-RPSMA adapters, and even VCO’s and antennas. We found out that through this process that one of the downmixer outputs transmitted data less strongly than the other downmixwer we ordered which seems to be a factory default.
Upon figuring this out and changing downmixers, we were able to see similar if not almost identical signals on each antenna. We were able to see strong and accurate signals and were able to collect data that would be able to used for correlation and phase detection.
The next step for this week is to make sure the outcome of this data is suitable for beamforming and that beamforming works come demo time. We are sure that our data is correct, but we must check that the beamfoming output is also correct for the heatmap overlay. As we work on this, we will provide dummy data to Txanton such that he can create a dummy heatmap overlay in time for demo