A project - with fellow engineering students

So, three weeks into an outreach project and I decide to post about it (sounds like my usual behavior!).

The University has given two fellow electronic engineers and myself the chance to work on an eight week project over the summer, which is pretty cool. The purpose of this project is to bolster the outreach displays of the electronic engineering department with an exhibition of as many aspects of the discipline as possible. More simply, a scalextric track with autonomous cars, solar panels and radar, WOOHOO.

To be fair the past three weeks would have looked fairly unproductive to the casual observer, very few physical objects have come together. This is because the teams efforts have been directed towards learning how to use our micro controllers of (the University's) choice, the MSP430 manufactured by Texas Instruments.

While simple arduino-like interfaces exist for the MSP430, our project leader insisted that we mirror industrial practice more faithfully and use the more complex Code Composer Studio. While much of the past fortnight has been apparently fruitless as we began to understand how the interaction on the micro controller happened at a hardware level, as a team we now have a good understanding of the micro controllers at a hardware level (funny that).

My own part of the project so far has been focused on ensuring the cars do not collide, and that has mainly meant ensuring that they can communicate wirelessly. The idea behind this is that we can reuse the communicated signals to triangulate the positions of the cars via RSSI.

Having pushed my way up from register level code, today I was finally able to produce a signal strength for distance graph today!

the graph! note that I have no idea of the vertical scaling, hence the simple label, 'not dB'

Sadly the graph indicates that my job is only going to get more interesting from here on out, as clearly when I invert the axis to solve car positions I am going to end up with multiple solutions!

The graph also raises the question of the problem of signals being reflected and so on (at least some of the odd results recorded were unrepeatable after moving various items of equipment around). Finally the graph also reveals very odd behavior around 20 and 70 centimeters. While this most likely an inconvenient reflecting object, the dips correspond (if you squint) to one and two times the wavelength of the RF signal of around 34 cm.

This is going to be a long project so I am hoping to get most of the anomalies solved by next week when perhaps I shall have more to share.

A parting action shot, testing in progress!