SOFTWARE CONTROL SYSTEMS FOR SMART ANTENNA

Aatish Gandotra, Tejaswi Singh

Abstract: A PCB containing microcontroller provides suitable DC voltages to the phase shifters and generates the smart antenna array beam steering. The detected WiFi signals are transferred into a mobile device through a WiFi adapter. This chapter will focus on the software design to automatically control the complete smart antenna array system. Since two microcontrollers PIC18F4550 and LPC1768 are used to build control PCBs. There are also two specifically designed software programs developed in order to configure the individual PCB. For the PIC18F4550, a graphical user interface (GUI) was developed to communicate between a laptop and the control PCB. The GUI sends commands to a Microchip compiler called MPLAB and transfers the control C code into a Hexadecimal (Hex) document. Through the Bootloader program, this Hex code will be copied into the microchip PIC18F4550 and then configures the digital potentiometers to generate variable output voltages. A script using VB is made to link all of the control steps automatically.

Keywords: Software Control System, Smart Antenna, Manual Control, Switching Control, Automatic Control.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.15623/ijret.2015.0411028