Peer to peer ranging system : hardware development

• Main Author: Tan, Ting Ze
• Other Authors: Law Choi Look
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2016
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/67963
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

This project was concerned with the development and evaluation of a peer to peer ranging system. The system shall use ultra-wideband impulse radio for time of arrival based measurements. The peer to peer nodes will transmit to each other and based on the time of arrival, the range between them was evaluated. Time of arrival (TOA) is the amount of time a signal takes to propagate from transmitter to receiver. With a constant and known signal propagation rate, the time of arrival of a signal can be used to calculate distance. [1] The project was dissected into two parts involving hardware development and software development. The hardware development involved constructing and testing a new hardware into a black box with components such as the Launchpad MSP432P401R, CC1101 Transceiver, Analog to Digital Converter (ADC) Board, Ultra-wide band (UWB) transmitter and receiver. The hardware black box act as the peer to peer node that will be used for transmitting and receiving signals with the input of firmware codes in the MSP432P401R. The codes are for testing the functionality of the ADC board, UWB transmitter and receiver. The software development involved writing of firmware codes using the platform Code Composer Studio (CCS). One of the firmware code is to give instructions that pull the data from all the data bits of the ADC to which ever input/output (I/0) line and ensure a fast transfer of the data into the memory of MSP432P401R using Dynamic Memory Access (DMA). Once the data is stored in the memory, a separate firmware code was needed to direct the data stored to a computer via Universal Asynchronous Receiver/ Transmitter (UART) module of the MSP432P401R. MATLAB will then be used to display the data for evaluation.