The final month of the project was great. 

We wrote up our Senior Design Final Report. It had over 50 pages of content, which addresses the various stages of the project, provides complete test results with graphs, and much more.

We also had the chance to do different demonstrations for different professors, who all were very impressed with it.

Later this month we will be turing in our keys. This marks the end of our involvement in the Project. However, a group of upperclassmen students will be implementing similar boards based on our design as a Technogenesis summer project.
 

In this month we finished the most significant phases of the project.

We were able to finally implement our design, and connect the components to each other. We also did the back panel power wiring.

The system done, we were able to perform overall system testing, both with wires and wirelessly. Our system worked as good as we expected. For wireless test runs and demonstration, we had the signal generator broadcasting Sin waves at frequencies around 2.4 GHz, and our system was capturing the signals wirelessly, and after its two phase down conversion, was outputting the resulting signal on the computer screen.

In addition to the system, we were able to create a LabView software utility that plots the output signal of our system in real-time, allows storing the output as a CSV or TXT file, or e-mail it for further analysis.

April 24th was the Senior Design day! We moved our system to the Howe center and we performed demos and explained our project to the guests.

We had the project oral presentation in B-118 on April 30th, in which we discussed the project and the various technical and financial aspects of it. It went very well.

The local oscillator was powered and it worked beautifully. Testing of the LO was carried out, and it worked just as expected. Now that we have the LO working, we also took the chance to test the demodulator at various frequencies of interest.

On another side of the project, work is being done to make computers "talk" to our signal generator. This will be used for our senior design day demonstration, as we will have the signal generator generate various frequencies, and then wirelessly transmit it to our RF receiver, which will pick the signals up. we will demonstrate that by showing the output of the RF on another PC.

We were able to create our own SMA cables for power (soldered regular wires to SMA male connectors). That being done, we are now ready to test the switch.

Testing of the switch was done successfully, both ends were tested for leakage.

Call us nerds, but we spent the spring break in the lab. This week was very important and significant to our progress, as we were able to get started with testing (Finally!). We were able to test the two filters used. We soldered the two amplifiers to wires, and were able to test them (the amplifiers) as well. Testing results for the filters, amplifiers, and the rest of the components are available in the "Documents" section of this web site.

The Local Oscillator is a generic one, so we had to "program it" to work with our project. After working the equations and finding the pins assignment, we customized a db-25 ribbon cable so that the LO will function safely and provide us with 70 MHz.

The GAGE data acquisition cards were installed in the system and they are working fine now.

In addition, we drilled holes for the receiver side, and took care of many miscellaneous issues in the system.

The PC came back and was fine now. We were able to finally get it to work. 

We put the components on the board to see how they will fit.

Final preparation for testing was done at this time as well. We are very careful in testing as the components and testing devices are really sensitive and can easily be damaged.

We continued setting up the lab. The industrial PC we purchased gave us a hard time when we tried to install the Data Acquisition cards from Gage technology. It had some hardware problems and we had to return it back to the manufacturer to replace defective pieces.

In this month we also were able to draw up the testing procedures and phases. Testing is a fundamental part of this project.

Setting up the lab. After we got a small private lab in B125, we started moving devices and components in there and setting up the lab for the project.

We finally settled on a design prototype to implement. Noise figure calculations, research to find components was done at that time. This stage was spent in careful planning for things to come, we wanted everything to be ready so as to get started as soon as possible the next semester.