= Plant Doctor: Harnessing Backscatter Radio Sensors for Agriculture =
**WINLAB Summer Internship 2024**\\
**Group Members:** Sam-Fone Cheung & Shriya Das\\
**Advisor:** Aggelos Bletsas


== Project Objective 
Backscatter radio, or reflection radio, offers a low-cost and low-power alternative to conventional radio sensor networks. This is crucial for modern agriculture which requires continual monitoring of environmental conditions such as soil moisture or temperature. Prior research using capacitance sensors to measure soil moisture has shown promising results using backscatter radio, despite the limited range.

Our group expanded this work to use temperature sensors on a plants which will transmit information using a network of RFID tags. These sensors should be battery-less and low-cost as they will harvest ambient radio frequency (RF) energy. 

== Weekly Progress
===== WEEK ONE =====
[https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/176HsRDAxeJxmf1tP5aNRFMfCJ6p95QO6EIxRgzuDiPA/edit?usp=share_link Week 1 Presentation]\\
//Progress: //Read prior art about [https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8454387 backscatter radios], RFID (radio frequency identification) tags, and using [https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8454387 capacitance sensors to measure soil moisture]. 


===== WEEK TWO =====
[https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1bY_nNpxIUeusqLehttZEXWjmkHdcylSNkebI1xsyuZM/edit?usp=sharing Week 2 Presentation]\\
//Progress: //Used RTL-SDR's to explore software-defined radios (SDR) and tune into local FM stations. Also familiarized ourselves with [https://www.gnuradio.org GNURadio]. 


===== WEEK THREE =====
[Week 3 Presentation]\\
//Progress: //Continued using GNURadio to understand [https://wiki.gnuradio.org/index.php?title=Simulation_example:_FSK frequency shift keying], periodograms