Hi everybody, here we are again! In the middle of what seems to be an unproductive run of weeks, this 6th official week of work remains as not being particularly prolific as well. The only aspect that we seem to have made some progress in is the hardware part of the project. Given that we’re still waiting for the material to arrive, we remain a bit conditioned by that fact, but there’s still room to learn, which we have done.
Last week we talked about how we were chatting with electronics experts about our prototype, asking for their feedback and debating certain component choices. Well, that conversation went on during this week, actually, and we got some very useful and concrete advice.
First of all, the expert we contacted mentioned the importance of settling on a reliable telecommunications link and testing it between two microcontrollers on a safe environment to see if we can get real-time communication, before moving on to more obstructed environments. For those that may not know, a link is a communication channel that connects two or more devices for the purpose of data transmission. It may be an actual physical device or a virtual circuit. There are several types of links, but we were recommended the UART (Universal Asynchronous Receiver-Transmitter) type due to its reliability.
Other than this, the expert also pointed out that we may not actually need a microcontroller at all, but this possibility is based around the use of lasers, following the concept of LiFi (Light Fidelity). However, this idea goes against our initial plan - lasers have a very narrow focus, which would require immense precision by the user when pointing the transmitter to the receiver. For the most part, this just isn’t feasible. Even though the microcontroller may still bear a bit of a burden, it still remains our top choice - another reason for this is the fact that the microcontroller allows the implementation of noise cancelling algorithms, which, even though don’t really match our main goal, would be a big bonus for our product.
So, here is what we’ve done over the course of this week. We look forward to the next couple weeks because we are all a bit more freed up in terms of work related to other classes. When we eventually receive the components we’ve ordered, we’ll also be able to make a lot more progress and actually do more of the fun stuff. So, having said all this, see you next week and thank you for stopping by!