This week proved itself to be another slow one, but the work carries on. Since our last post, we have made a bit of progress on the hardware department by seeking counseling with experts in electronics.
As said before, over the course of this week we looked for help and talked to experts in electronics, asking them to give their opinion on our hardware choices. About the microcontroller, we were told that the Teensy board would definitely be a good choice. Other than this piece of advice, we were also asked to talk more in-depth about our product and its specifications, which kind of happens to be useful to talk about here:
So, it is set in stone that we are going to use OOK (on-off keying), for the reasons we have spoken about in previous posts. About the idea of having real-time communication, it remains as a goal of ours, but that can only happen if it can sustain our objectives of having an SNR of at least 25 dB, and a BER of 10^-3. Nevertheless, for the communication itself (real-time or pre-recorded), we look to have a sampling rate somewhere between 20k and 40k samples/s, transmitting at 8-12 bits. This information would be compressed with a lossless compression algorithm, like LZW, and we look to integrate error correction codes, as the Hamming(7,4) code, paired up with other convolutional code alternatives.
We also designed a block diagram for the transmitter, as shown in the image presented below, which comprised some of the concepts talked about above.
So, here we are. Work has been in fact a bit slow, but we continue thinking and learning about the project. The future seems promising. Thank you for catching up with us, and we’ll see you all next week!