Close

Featured!

A project log for Radiolocation using Pocket Size Transceiver

Let your home automation know which room you're in, your car to know if you're nearby or any other need to detect proximity over a range.

eric-herbersEric Herbers 01/27/2015 at 05:090 Comments

First off, I want to thank Hackaday for featuring my project on the main page! It's a real honor for me, being a long time reader, and I was very pleased with the discussion that took place; it was very constructive.

As a handful of you picked up on I am not measuring lost packets; any of those results are rejected. I did dabble with packet loss to begin with and determined that was no good way to assign a good time value to a lost packet and handling them amongst the data was going to be troublesome. I've also played with trying to accomplish as many transmissions as possible within a time frame. That too did not work terribly well, I suspect due to limitations with the transmissions still being synced to clock cycles.

What I've been doing lately, at a very slow pace, is focusing on trying to filter data better before I begin to tackle multi-channel use; something I played with early on, but found requires some pretty extensive error handling in terms of telling the transponder to change a channel and confirming it happened. Often I could successfully make a channel change, but then never receive the auto-acknowledge... it's likely something I'll have to handle manually.

What I have done is temporarily gotten rid of using standard deviation on the raw values as I found using the true average yielded better results; using standard deviation often reduced the sensitivity to changes in distance. To help smooth things out, but still accomplish a decent refresh rate, I've gone to using a rolling average. So for instance I'm doing a test of 200 pings, and averaging 10 of them. It allows me to see a change in position fairly quickly, but still average out erroneous data. So far this is working very well; especially as I've placed some focus on trying to increase the number of significant digits.

I'm also just beginning to play with different data rates. Previously I was running at 250 kBps and have recently changed to 2 MBps to see how it works. At first glance it appears to offer more consistent results, but I've also made some changes to the rolling average programming around the same time so some A-B-A testing is necessary. Still, hopes are up!

Discussions