Presentation
Our team spent a considerable amount of time early in the week creating the presentation slide deck. Some considerable effort went into creating some of the animations and visuals to accompany the technical content of our presentation. In particular, we provided an artist’s rendition of our final product, a series of animated beamformer signal response plots, and a block diagram of our product. (We note that the feedback from one of the instructors stated that we stole our block diagram from somewhere without crediting its source — this could not be further from the truth, as we created the diagram ourselves.) We also chose Vrishab as our presenter and helped him dry-run the presentation.
Downconversion
We had a lengthy discussion with Shaun Stevens who is Dr. Kim’s graduate student. During our meeting, Shaun helped us flesh out the downconversion process and provided feedback on other aspects of our implementation.
With his help, we have now identified the specific channel of 2.4GHz WiFi that we are going to work with — channel 6 — which has a bandwidth of 22MHz. Thus, after downconversion, our A/D converter need only sample at the nyquist rate of (22/2)MHz upper frequency * 2 = 22MHz. We have selected the specific ADC that will accomplish this task.
Progress Since Last Week
We now have identified all of the components that are needed to implement our system from the antenna array through the FPGA. We have also identified the critical components for our downconverter, which we were not aware we needed as of last week.
Plans for Next Week
We will begin PCB layout next week and plan to meet with Dr. Carley for feedback on our layout once complete. We plan to send out our schematics to have our PCB fabricated at the end of next week.