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MEMORANDUM

Date: March 30th, 2014

To: David Michelson, Associate Professor, UBC

CC: yinh@ece.ubc.ca

From: EECE 380 Group L2B1

Subject: Weekly Review

Dear Dr. Michelson,

The purpose of this memo is to inform the course staff of EECE 380 about our team’s progress during this past week as well as any difficulties we encountered.

Our group continued with our design process, working on each component of the project. Parts ordered from Digikey had arrived and we were able to test and begin implementing each components of our design. Temperature sensor was easy to be set up, which only required a load resistor for calibration. An IR emitter and a photodiode were used to transmit and receive infrared signal so that we can measure the RPM of the windmill. One problem we faced was the effective distance is too short so have to make sure they are working the range next week. We intended to power all of our sensors and actuation circuit a solar cell we ordered from Digkey. It could output a steady voltage about 6V but the current obtained was too small, which was around 60 micro-amps. Therefore we might have to go to an electronics store to purchase another more powerful solar cell.

Next week we will finish combining the main functions of Q4000 into one program. Also, we will finish implementing and integrating all the hardware components. We hope to have the two jobs done as soon as possible, as time until our deadline is less than a week and we need time for troubleshooting.

With Regards,

Chun Yeung Chow

Memorandum

EECE 380 Group L2B1

To: David Michelson, Associate Professor, UBC

From: CHUN YEUNG CHOW, Student

Date: March 2, 2014

Subject: Weekly Review

Dear Dr. Michelson,

This is the last week before our first project is due, and we started to combine all the components together early this week. We put the test signal and VCO into the mixer, then connected that into two cascaded CE amplifiers, followed by a Crystal Ladder filter. The precision peak detector was the biggest problem that it was not working desirably. Then we have discussed and figured out that our design could use a simple peak detector instead. Unfortunately, it is still not working properly so far. Moreover, we observed that the gain of our amplifier is not enough and the loss of a tested signal is quite large so we have to come up with different ideas to solve these problems as soon as possible.

We got into the troubleshooting late into the project.  After we put the hardware and software together, we had a lot of problems finding the correct display, mostly because our signal magnitude was too small (less than 35dBm).

For next week our team plans to finish the project as much as possible and begin writing the presentation/report so that we are ready to demo on Wednesday, March 5.

With Regards,

CHUN YEUNG CHOW