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Team status report 4/8

This week, we worked on getting the demo working. Our demo consists of our laptop pinging a phone, and measuring ToF of the ping from an ESP; the data from the ESP is then fed to a MATLAB script that localizes the device. We were able to get localization within 1 meter accuracy in the demo, and we also video recorded the process. We started working on integration of our individual parts, and we ordered some IoT devices that we will use for testing our integration as well.

Not much was changed from the design, except that we could not get PicoScenes to work so we are using ESPs to do the ToF and RSS measurements. We got two ESPs that we worked with, and there is no significant cost because we already had more than enough budget.

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Team Status Report 4/1/2023

Last week, we actually verified all of our individual parts together and collected our first data traces. Results are promising, as we see increased accuracy from the higher clock speed of the ESP over the prototyping data we were using. No changes have been made to the system, but we’re considering working with a different infiltration method (RTS/CTS frames) if we can not get picoScenes measuring ack frames.

The biggest question mark for us is the clock drift in devices we saw occurring. This means that one of our wifi devices was taking longer and longer to respond to packets (due to overheating or clock slowdown), even if the distance between the RX/TX was the same. Our contingency plan for tackling this is using shorter windows, and possibly restricting the users movement to when we want them to. This would allow us to know when clock drift is occurring and when it is user movement causing an increase in ToF.

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Anish Status Report for 04/01

Over the past week I worked on fixing some bugs in the ESP32 code and using it to start collecting data traces to test our algorithms with. It works better than expected; after filtering outliers and doing smoothing, the results are pretty consistent with what they should look like (at least over a several-meter range). We’re still trying to get it working on short ranges as well. There are no major roadblocks that I see blocking us going forward. I also started taking data measurements with the Yagi directional antenna to see if that data can be useful to our final algorithm or if the ToF data is sufficient.

In the next week I’m hoping to work on the end-user interface and figure out how we’ll actually stream the results out of our algorithm and display it to the user.

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Thomas Status Report 4/1/2023

Hey, happy april fools.

Last week, Anish and I collected our first actual data trace with the ESP32 for ToF logging. I finished up scripts for self-localization and visualizing the data traces, while Anish coded the ESP back end for measuring ToF. This should put us back on track for our schedule and on pace to meet the demo on Wednesday.

General thoughts about the data: ToF is a super noisy measurement, we might need to increase our scanning time in the final system. The accuracy is a little low, but this is mainly due to some clock drift that’s happening in our transmitting laptop just because its super old. We’ll have to figure out how to distinguish the clock drift from actual SIFS timing or movement next week.

Next week, I’ll focus on preparing for the demo and improving the processing with the actual data we collected. Results are promising (the trace where we got everything working was within a meter of the target), but we need more testing to verify it.

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Ethan’s Status Report 4/1

This week I worked on cleaning up the scripts I wrote. I couldn’t figure out a way to make PicoScenes detect null/ACK packets, so we might not be able to use it for ToF measurement. I think we can use it to measure RSS data because it doesn’t really matter if the timing is not too accurate, but at that point perhaps using PicoScenes is more of a burden than what it’s worth. For next week, I’ll be working on preparing for the demo and cleaning up rest of the scripts.