David went through part of a tutorial on PADS and learned about a lot of nice features. Perhaps before the Senior Design students disappear, he can sit down with Samad and they can work together on designing the new OCXO board - this is an extremely simple board which will be good practice for both of them.
George stopped by with some SMA cables that he had picked up at Radio Shack, but they didn't have the right connectors to interface with our boards. Brian thinks he can make his own cable, but I told George that they really need to order some off-the-shelf ones online as a backup, and also because making a good quality coax cable with no impedance nonuniformities (which can cause signal reflections) is in general quite difficult; making a cable that really offers a reliable high-quality connection suitable for GHz-bandwidth signals can be a challenge. Brian supposedly has experience making coax cables, but we can't risk any more delays if they can't build a working cable. We found 12" cables at Cables to Go (hopefully these will be long enough; 16" or 18" might also be suitable, if we can find them) and George says he will order them and they should arrive on Tuesday. But hopefully he & Brian can make a cable before then that will work well enough to at least wire up & test the main electronics box assembly.
The main thing I worked on today was trying to configure the Wi-Fi connection using my Verizon MiFi 4G/LTE mobile hotspot. We tried WEP 64-bit, but the modules wouldn't connect, perhaps because the MiFi would only let me enter a 10 hex digit (40-bit) key? The Norton might have been blocking the connection, but I switched off the relevant features and this didn't fix the problem. If I continue having problems, I'll uninstall Norton; it only has 11 days before the demo license expires anyway. I went ahead and configured rules in Windows Firewall to open the needed ports.
In the meantime, I changed the Wi-Fi script to turn on info-level output, so I can see exactly where it is having problems. I'm also trying to configure it for WPA2 Personal since that is the most secure level supported by the MiFi - as long as we're trying different things, we might as well try the most secure mode first. The EZURiO does support WPA2 Personal, according to the docs; however I haven't tested this mode on it before. I'm working on augmenting the script to support this mode as an option selectable in the site configuration.
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Working while on a trip this evening, I finished the script changes to support WPA2-Personal security, and got the script to compile. (As usual when adding code, this involved moving more strings out to the strings.txt file.) The changes still need to be tested on a real Wi-Fi board next time I am in the lab (or at home).
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