These past two weeks were extremely productive – I finalized our hardware stack into a small, battery-powered unit (see the pictures in our “Team Status Report 04/22”) that attaches to the back of the user’s phone. The processing stack runs on a laptop, which can be anywhere in the vicinity (the user doesn’t have to carry it around the room when doing the scan); and the laptop connects wirelessly to the rest of the electronics using a 900MHz (ISM band) radio. I refined the firmware for the ESP32 to use this wireless link to talk to a driver (implemented in Python) on the laptop, as well as programming the ESP8266 to send out the pinging packets (hence completing the time-of-flight loop).
I feel like we are very much on schedule as our integration-testing all works – we can walk around a room with the sensor for ~4 minutes, and see in the AR view that the Wi-Fi devices are located to within the 1m accuracy. There are a few points left to be refined during the next week, including nicer visualization (both on the laptop and in the AR space) and making the device detection run fully asynchronously and feed into the rest of the stack, and after that it’s just working on our report and unit-tests.