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Plant Doctor: Harnessing Backscatter Radio Sensors for Agriculture
WINLAB Summer Internship 2024
Group Members: Sam-Fone Cheung, Shriya Das, Aly Mustafa, Xiang Meng
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 (radio frequency identification) tags. These sensors should be battery-less and low-cost as they will harvest ambient radio frequency (RF) energy.
Over the summer, our team split into two groups to build the transmitter and receiver, ultimately converging.
Weekly Progress
WEEK ONE
| Receiver | Transmitter |
|---|---|
| Read prior art about backscatter radio, RFID tags, and capacitance sensors. | Started learning the TI Launchpad microcontroller, read the documentation, and spoke to an expert. |
WEEK TWO
| Receiver | Transmitter |
|---|---|
| *Used RTL-SDR's to explore software-defined radios (SDR) and tune into local FM stations. *Also familiarized ourselves with GNURadio and its tutorials. | *Learned how to use TI Launchpad MCU MSP-EXP430G2ET. *Implemented an adjustable 200kHz-300kHz 50% duty cycle square wave output. Also implemented user input through digital input using the I/O pins. *Attempted potentiometer user input, but did not successfully complete it. |
WEEK THREE
Progress: Continued using GNURadio to implement frequency shift keying (FSK) and periodograms (maximum likelihood estimators). We also used MATLAB/Octave to compare our results from GNURadio using the SDR.
WEEK FOUR
Progress: Explored the accuracy of the receiver while changing the power transmission, frequency, and distance between the SDR and signal generator. Learned about matched filters and how to implement them into the receiver. Despite a frequency measurement error, we implemented logging into GNURadio using a file sink.
Using the TI Launchpad Microcontroller we were able to implement FSK. also created a block diagram to illustrate how both the transmitter and receiver should work together to send information about a plant's temperature.
WEEK FIVE
Progress:
WEEK SIX
Progress:
Attachments (8)
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unnamed.png
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Week 3 GNURadio Periodogram
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unnamed.2.png
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Week 4 Block Diagram
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Screenshot 2024-07-03 133035.png
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wheatstone bridge
- wheatstone.png (71.1 KB ) - added by 5 months ago.
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Periodogram.png
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Periodogram
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Plant Week 8 .png
(10.7 MB
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Week8_Plant
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Plant Chamber.png
(14.4 MB
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Week 10 Plant Chamber
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Plant Doctor WINLAB Poster.pptx.png
(1.9 MB
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Plant Doctor Poster
