Pictures!

Just like promised a bunch of pictures illustrating our progress with the project.

Here you can see our ultrasonic 

tracievers in our aquarium.

We need to test it in this fashion 

because this transmission setup

only works under water.

Here we have the elektronics for our transmitter system,

on the left of the PCB you can see the transmission circuit.

And on the right you can see the receiver circuit.

Here you can see the osciloscope image, the blue line

is our transmission and the green line is our received

signal.

Just another image displaying the first prototype of the

swimsor casing.

Long time no blog

Owke so i have not been blogging for a while now. This is mostly because we have been so busy working on the project.

So what have we been so busy with. We have been working on getting our underwater communication online. In the past we have been trying to get this to work using 433Mhz trancievers. This looked very promising but during our final tests it came out that this would not work, mostly because we had a range of about 1 mtr. Wich would have meant that we would need a lot of mediator stations along side the pool.

After this failure we had a couple of electronics student do research into alternative trancievers. This resulted in the effort to use ultrasonic communication. The students did have the time to test the range of the system, and this is rather promising. They had a clear signal through to entire swimming pool of our institute. But they did not have the time to create the electronics. 

This then came up to me, so for the past 10 weeks i have been researching en developing the electronics to send the signal and then receive and filter it.

It was only last week that i had the breakthrough that i was waiting for. We are at the point that we can send a pulsating signal wich is being received and amplified on the other side.

The next step is to use a microprocessor to decode the signal and devide it into the contained frequency's. So basicaly do a spectrum analisys on the signal.

In the end it would have been faster the just buy a solution out of the box, but our main concern with this was that it would be to bulky to place on the back of the swimmer. Our own system consists of only one small pcb and 2 tiny tranceivers.

Pictures will folow soon, and i will try to keep this blog updated regulary from now on.

Where are we now

In the past weeks we have been working on creating a solution for our under water communication. Because we have discovered that the 433Mhz radio trancievers are not suited for our purpose.

Now we are working on creating a circuit for our alternative communication methods. Once this is working we will fill you in through this blog. We hope to have this functioning before the end of the week.

Henk is working on defining the research methods, to get the right information out of the swimming coaches.

New group

This week the groups where changed again, stefan has left the swimsor project and Dennis has returned. Together with a new group member Henk van Heerde we will work on the swimsor for the next 20 weeks.

Our aim is to work out our proof of concept to a prototype.

In the past 10 weeks there were 2 electronics students working on the research into the underwater wireless comunication. In the past we have used 433 Mhz Radio frequency to communicate. And now we are going to use Ultrasonic transcievers at 30 Khz to comunicate. During the testing the students have measured a range of 14 Meters under water. This looks promising. The only problem is that these students did not have the time to work this out to a working module. So it comes to me (as an ICT student) to buy or create the communication modules.

Once this objective is reached we will go to eindhoven to present our product to the KNZB en we will descuss how we are going to present our data to the swimming coaches.

So we have a large tasklist for the next 20 weeks.