A repo for a directed study project. Used to navigate the 'GWS5000' TVWS radio's WebUI and gather data.
As the project evolves, ill link data + documentation to explain the project more.
If there is a paper, it will speek to a higher level of knowledge. I will try to keep the readme file in as close to layman's terms so everyone can enjoy!
Input: Uses Selenium to navigate through webgui and records data.
Output: Currently only .csv files supported.
Its my first time writing a webscraper. A fun activity however, it has quite a few performance inprovement opportunities. This thing was written on and off over a week to hit a deadline.
Next semester, I will be implementing Setting navigation and 'safe' recording of data. Smart navigation of settings that ensures a RSSI value > -40 is danger. If a value like that is detected when incrementing settings. Stops navigating the settings up that way.
This semester's research did not require the changing of settings. Currently we only are measuring soil depth and how that affects the signal. We will possibly mess with the RX gain of the broadcasting base station. However, thats simple enough to change ourselves.
TV-WhiteSpace(TVWS) is the name for the newly (2010) re-classified TV spectrum. What does that mean?
Communications 101: In grade-school they taught about the electromagnetic spectrum, everything from UV, microwaves, radio and visable light was on it. The main difference between each of these is how fast the frequency is. Radio waves are on the lower end, and gamma waves are on the higher end. Generally, The LOWER the frequency is, the FURTHER it can travel and the DEEPER it can penetrate. LOW frequency and HIGH wavelength creates signals that travel further.
Keep with me im going to drop some numbers:
- 2.4/5 GHz is the most common frequency of WI-FI.
- 54-698 MHz is the frequency of TVWS.
Just paying attention to the units, GHz to MHz is quite a large change. This can be seen by how far each is able to broadcast. It varies but WI-FI usually tops out at 100ft. TVWS on the other hand can be beamed over 10Km.
This is the primary reason that it was used to broadcast TV. TV was first broadcast with an analog signal however, it was then swapped to a digital signal. Analog can be thought of as continuous, or 0,0.1,0.2,...0.8,0.9,1. Digital can be through of as 0/1. As you can see by my example, digital is much more space efficient. As digital broadcasting replaced analog, gaps of unused space began to appear. This brings us back to the FCC in the 2010 passing legislation to re-categorize the un-used space into what is now TVWS.
As we have shown, TVWS broadcasts further than other categories of radio. This git project exists to pull data from a TVWS antenna webgui. We are going to bury the receiver and see how different depths changes the measured characteristics.
See the Documentation folder for more.
- While in the TVWSDataScraper/ path, run the bash file to download requirements:
' bash setup.sh '
- Config + Secret files are built on first run to save from leaking settings. Run the below code to run the program.
'python tvwsdatascraper.py'
Note to self. fix the bash script to create correct 'tvws' venv and then on python run swap to the venv