PHASE 1: PREPARATIONS
Inspection of initial design and calculations. Work load estimation of this phase: 20h.

1. Students must have made calculations about needed amplification and time of flight measurement for the ultrasound sensors:
   • Since the attenuation of the signal depends on so many things, the amplification in both transmitter and receiver is required to be adjustable. Students must present a calculation of how much should the reception approximately be amplified to get reasonable output in lowest reception power. These calculations depend on used design, so the approximate solution for both transmitter and receiver amplification circuitry must be presented. Some helpful links are presented at the web pages.
     
     How to calculate?
     
     • Familiarize yourself with the term DB
     • See the specification of a typical ultrasound transmitter and receiver, especially the 0dB i.e. reference values.
     • See this help file for calculations.
     • Now you can decide how much the received signal should be amplified with OP amp.
     
     
   • How long time (or how many pulses) can the transmission be kept on in order to be able to measure the shortest distance, and how long does it take to measure the longest distance.
     
     The distance can be measured from time of flight of the ultrasound. Speed of sound is appr 340m/s.
     
     
2. The web pages give some workload estimates of each task set for each meeting. Based on these estimates and students own reasoning, the students must make their own timetable, and preliminarily book the rest of the meetings with their assistants. The meeting times are preliminary i.e. they can be revised later, but the purpose is to give the students the idea of how to spend time with this course. The students must notify certain things regarding the deadline:
   • The assistants may be on holiday at some points of the course, i.e. there may be restrictions for meeting times.
   • There are 25 other groups per assistant attending this course, i.e. this limits the available times for meetings, and the availability of programming and debugging points in TS139. Note that especially in May, when the deadline is approaching, TS139 tends to be very crowded.
   • The equipment may get broken occasionally due to too rough handling. The assistants repair things to their best ability, but they cannot be checking the equipment after every single group. Thus, we hope that you handle things very carefully, and repair what you break. Repair guide is available on the course web pages.
   • The ordering of components takes about a week.
   • The milling of the PCB takes about a week, depending on the milling queue.
3. The students must present block diagram of the hardware (slightly more detailed from the given one), and another block diagram of the software functionality (very high level is sufficient). They also must present, which peripheral of the MCU will used for each functionality.
4. For this phase the students should get familiar with the ultrasound information links, MCU datasheet and components suggestions given in the web pages.