Personal Accomplishments:
- Ethics Lecture & Activities (3 hrs): During lecture time on Monday, I attended the ethics session and participated in the in-class activities. We analyzed some of the worst-case scenarios for our projects and discussed them with other teams.
- Radar Work (9 hrs): The primary work this week was on the radar tuning. After the software bring-up was done last week, my goal was to figure out how to tune the radar parameters and make them useful to our needs this week. I started by plotting the radar output using some codes provided by RFBeam. Here is an example output:
There are a lot of parameters that can be tuned for the radar to achieve different detection outcomes. I researched the ways to tune the parameters based on the datasheet. There is a Python driver that contains some helper functions to tune these parameters, but I think we do not need to rely on that as the tuning should be very simple based on the datasheet. Another thing that I was exploring this week was how to process the radar targets. I did some brief tests on Wednesday to figure out how the radar is outputting the target. In the raw target mode, it would show the target in reference to the local x-y locations. Since the radar is mounted toward the back of the bike, the y-axis indicates how far the car is from the bike and the x-axis shows if the car is left or right on the bike. This work will be continued next week.
Progress:
I am currently somewhat on track with the radar tuning, although more work might need to be done, so it might go over the time that we originally budgeted. There were some delays to get the tuning started as it was complicated. However, I am on track after the adjusted schedule. Please see the team status report for more details.
Next Week:
- Continuation of radar tuning
- Preparing for the interim demo.