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Txanton’s Status Report for 02/27/2021

This past week I spent some time preparing for my team’s project proposal presentation which helped me get more comfortable with talking about our project and helped me be able to explain it to others better. It also helped me to reinforce some of the parts of the project that I was previously less informed about.

Regarding moving forward with the project I started to come up with a plan for how we were going to setup the antenna array. I came up with an idea for a 3D printed or machined piece of plastic that would allow us to place specifically spaced holes for the antennas to go through. By attaching the antenna’s to a rigid body we would be able to get them at very specific spacings and angles in order to get the best results for beamforming. It would also allow us to quickly prototype if we needed to make adjustments to the spacings in the future (note: while outside the scope of our capstone project this theoretically means that our overlying system could be adapted to support beamforming with different antenna’s and spacings for other frequencies). Since the antennas would be mounted to this board we would connect them to a custom PCB over individual wires, and then use a larger header on that PCB in order to interface it with either our FPGA or Software Defined Radio system.

While I still need to discuss it with my group after additional research I personally believe that GNU Radio will be more difficult than trying to implement our own DSP functionalities in an FPGA. This upcoming week we will start focusing more on the exact spacing for our antenna and start searching for which specific antenna’s we are going to order so that we can get started with prototyping as soon as possible. I will also get started on doing research into the kind of requirements needed for making a PCB with high frequency RF signals. Some key focuses for that will be trace impedance, trace width, trace isolation (to prevent cross-talk/noise), and I will try and find any other possible best practices.

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Vrishab’s Status Report for 02/20/2021

This week I worked on structuring our signal processing pipeline that we will use for beamforming. In particular, I read through several papers on how to beamform wifi signals, as well as implementation details regarding the spacing of array elements. I also met with Dr. Richard Stern to discuss implementation and architectures of beamformers in the domain of audio processing.

Our progress is on schedule in terms of the beamformer design. Within the next week, I hope to have finalized a beamforming algorithm we will use in our design. I also hope to have identified the critical components that we will need (antennas, A/D converters, clocks, etc.) for our beamformer.

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Enock’s Status Report for 02/20/2021

This week I focused on deciding on what kind of hardware we would try to do some of the signal processing and programming intensive computations. Within the budget and availability I found the Zynq Ultra96 v2 board would be the best in terms of price, size, and ease of use. This board is used in 18-643 so we are hoping to be able to borrow a board if possible. If we use Vivado it will be very easy to use existing IP blocks that will allow for us to use modules that will interface with certain components or that will do certain DSP computations without having to write our own in SystemVerilog. Furthermore the board is an MPSoC which allows for us to write certain parts in C++ and to establish a separate workflow for those who will be working on the programming side and those working on the hardware side (aka Verilog). Aside from this I decided it might be a good idea to focus on LTE signals rather than WiFi since it is more common for devices to be transmitting/receiving LTE than WiFi so from a security standpoint it might catch more users with this frequency. This, however, may limit our testing capabilities since we will have less devices with LTE compared to WiFi enabled devices. I hope to be able to find out if we can use this board in our project as well as if we will have enough testing data to use LTE as our base signal.

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Txanton’s Status Report for 02/20/2021

This week I focused on looking into different microcontrollers to see which one would best fit our application. For Wi-Fi it appears the the ESP32 line of microcontrollers by Espressif would work well since it has the ability to both transmit and receive Wi-Fi signals built into it. One concern would be if it lets us get enough data from the signal or if it only gives us the decoded packets as we need raw signal information in order to properly do beamforming. For LTE signals it seems that the NF9160 microcontroller by Nordic Semiconductors would work well as since it has LTE-M and also allows us to use GPS information which may be convenient data even if it doesn’t help us overall with the location of devices or beamforming. Once we solidify our requirements and decide on which protocol we will end up using I will do further research on how to setup and start developing for the microcontroller corresponding to that technology.