Final week before presentation

Now that we have about five and a half days to complete the project, with a course test in between, we're approaching the final stretch and finish line. The past few weeks have been quite productive, with respect to design and fabrication, mostly due to the hard work of Maxwell and David in design, and Richard in fabrication of the Butler matrix. About two weeks ago, we received the masks that were used for etching or printing on the circuit board.

Initially, when we went to print the boards, there was a problem with the plastic protection machine, whose function is was to place a layer of plastic over the board so as to protect it, so we left the remainder of printing for Meng-Hung under the command of Grbic, who told us that we shouldn't have been in the 411 lab since we were not OSH), so last Friday, we were able to assemble the parts of the project while testing individual components in between.

I can't say if Maxwell or David have put more time in the lab, but the two of them have carried out the majority of design and lab time. Under the advise of Maxwell, I have taken responsibility for the written report as well as the presentation slides and the link budget and signal characteristics. I'm not writing the entire report, only formatting, organizing, compiling, and making sure all the parts are included.

We didn't meet today, but ideally I will have all member contributions of the report by Saturday afternoon/evening so that I can complete a rough draft of the report for Sunday, so that it can be revised by the group. It would be best to have slides ready that day so that we can begin to practice or presentation which will be held on Tuesday afternoon after 3pm. We must remember to provide Grbic with a compact disc of our our files by 2pm on Tuesday, including our presentation, since we'll be running the presentation from his personal computer.