This week, I worked on the UWB systems. Because we got a UWB development board, the board must be flashed separately from the raspberry pi, which ends up being more work than anticipated. I had to figure out JLink communication from my laptop to flash the UWB boards, and then augment the basic UWB board operating system to communicate with an RPi over UART. Fortunately, the UWB boards are able to connect straight onto the Raspberry Pi GPIO pins after some basic soldering. As of now, the Pi’s can send commands to the UWB boards to act as a transmitter or a receiver, and they are able to extract distance information from the messaging process with enough accuracy for our purposes. I wrote a basic program to poll for distances in a psuedo-“initialization phase” situation.
Next week, I want to start using IMU data to get localization and triangulation working. I am roughly where I hoped to be by the end of this week. I would like to be totally done with the UWB OS next week, with all the needed functionality flashed onto the UWB boards and any future UWB development taking place as the RPi sending UART commands to the board. Some integration between UWB and vehicles should happen next week or the week after.