This week marked the start of the 4th term of the year, and with it the return to normal school activity. Even though we still haven’t received the material we ordered a while back, over the course of this week we progressed even further in the software department and started doing some much needed simulations, all the while “surviving” a nation-wide blackout.
As we predicted in the latest post, this week we continued last week’s work on the software part of the prototype, developing our own implementation of some ECC’s.
Our first achievement of the week was writing the C code for the Hamming(7,4) algorithm relative to the project, which is an ECC we talked about quite a long time ago. To put it in short, the Hamming(7,4) is an algorithm that adds three additional check bits to every 4 bits of data, which allows it do either detect and correct one wrong bit of information or to detect two wrong bit values.
The next step in the software development is writing the interleaving part of the code.
Added to the progress in the software part of the project, we also started doing some simulations, which is something we wrongfully downplayed at the start of the project, to be honest.
So far, our simulations (done in MATLAB) have consisted of basically generating signals through square waves and then obtaining the equivalent modulated message with OOK-NRZ, while also adding Gaussian White Noise to the signal to simulate the noise expected to be found when testing the prototype. With these simple simulations, our objective is to calculate the SNR from the noise channel in order to then obtain the BER value of the modulated message signal. In the near future, we will start adjusting and tweaking the noise channel to more adequately represent the obstacles the prototype will eventually face underwater.
Now that we are back to the usual ordeals, we are beginning to pick up the pace again and look forward to actually do the more hands-on part of the project (from the moment when the materials eventually arrive…). We have several tasks on our minds and will keep going at it.
So, bye, and see you all next week!