This week I made substantial progress on the system integration. I ported the pinging-initiator code to run on an ESP8266, and added an interface to configure and pull data from the ESP32+ESP8266 combo, over the UART, in real-time (the need for two microcontrollers comes from the inability to precisely timestamp outgoing packets, so we must send packets from one microcontroller and timestamp both the request and the response on the other). I’ve tested this against the rest of the system (by generating CSV files and piping them into the MATLAB pipeline) and it works quite well in terms of efficiency and reliability.
My next step is to finish integrating it with the rest of the stack by completing the wireless interface (which means the computer running the system doesn’t need to be carried around with the user while they are doing their scan) and writing the Python interface to allow integrating it with the device-detection and localization code. I’m a little worried about wireless reliability with the XBee radio I’m currently using, but there should be a way to make it work with a proper handshaking interface. As such, I feel like we are pretty on-schedule although will need to do substantial testing and debugging-integration in the next two weeks to get everything working.
The testing we need to do once everything is working is to walk around in a room and collect data; and then take various subsets of this data (to test for different timescales and movement patterns) and determine the accuracy of locating the different devices. This, combined with some unit-testing of the self-localization and visualization accuracy, should allow us to quantifiably verify our use-case requirements and metrics.