Week Ten

Conclusion:
Week ten concluded the schedule for our project. We presented our findings to a group of faculty and students. A series of multimedia were used which consisted of a PowerPoint presentation, a physical poster board, and a wireless demonstration of how A/V current worked. During the presentation we mainly discussed the data that we found and how it would have needed to have been applied were we to create a physical wireless HDMI.

The conclusion of the report recapped exactly what was accomplished from week to week and how certain steps led us to change the deliverable goal entirely. The layout for the poster and the PowerPoint presentation can both be found under the "Deliverables" tab at the top of this page

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Week Nine

During week nine the group successfully tested the transmitter/receiver pair. It was determined that the issue did not lie with the cable in use, but with the settings on the PS3 itself. The PS3 was still set to output via HDMI rather than via A/V during the original tests. This was simply a failure to adjust the settings on the PS3. Once the adjustment was made the device worked accurately and efficiently.

During the meeting we decided to give the presentation by demonstrating how the A/V transmitter/receiver pair worked with the PS3. The demonstration was initially going to consist of two parts. Part one would consist  of showing how the video looked when plugged directly into the television, and part two would be when the the PS3 was attached to the transmitter on one side of the room with the TV attached to the receiver on the other. This idea was scrapped for just part two for the sake of time. Along with this the group will have a power point presentation and a poster board which was designed using Prezi.

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Week Eight

Friday, May 23, 2014

11:03 AM

During the week prior to our meeting we realized we had the wrong cable. One of the ports on the cables that was sent with the wireless transmitter and receiver pair was not accommodated for video. Without testing the video component of the pair it was indeterminable if they worked. Once the right cable was found we completed testing the transmitter receiver to find that they do work. This specific testing involved a Play Station Three and television monitor to display the signals. 

Another possible demonstration that was discussed was using an old camera with AV capabilities. The AV camera would take a picture during the presentation and send it via the transmitter to a monitor where the receiver would display it, thus proving that the technology is in existence and allowing us to further discuss exactly how wireless technology works. 

During this weeks meeting a time line was also decided upon for preparing for the final presentation. During week nine the demonstrations, one using the Play Station and one using a router, would need to be put together by Wednesday. Both of these examples of wireless technology offer many points on technical complexity to speak about during the final presentation. Another idea for the demonstrations could be peer to peer sharing of documents via a router and discuss the technical aspects of how that works. 

On our poster and presentation we need to discuss options in the order that we came up with them and why we dismissed them, it is following this method that the presentation will make chronological sense 
One of the biggest demonstrations that were dismissed was the "Arduino"/raspberry board, PCB. These were all dismissed due to the fact that not enough student interaction would be needed to turn them in a a final deliverable; most of the work was already done by the companies that produced them.

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Week Seven

Friday, May 16, 2014

11:03 AM

In this weeks meeting, we discussed what the best options are for our final deliverable.  Professor Taskin and Scott talked about how it would be a good idea to use the wireless transmitter and receiver that we have to demonstrate transmitting a picture or video while describing the process behind it.  This will help us by illustrating our understanding of the research we have performed by putting it towards a physical device and it's processes.  This demonstration will go hand in hand with a poster we are in the midsts of creating.  Professor Taskin and Scott talked about what we should add on our poster such as a cost analysis and options of for products to solve the wireless HDMI issue.

Professor Taskin also mentioned how it would be a good idea to test the wireless transmitter and receiver by using two different configurations.  These configurations being a playstation and cable configuration to a TV and a digital camera sending a picture to a monitor of sorts.  We also talked about the possibility of these configurations not working, therefore we would analyze and discuss why we think they did not work.  This would then be used as our physical deliverable for our week 10 presentation

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Week Six

Friday, May 9, 2014

10:34 AM

After speaking with Scott on Friday, we learned that it would be extremely difficult and impractical to try to connect an Arduino as a substitute for a P.B.C. board to the transmitter and receiver we have, and so yet again we are unsure what our final deliverable should be.  However, Scott suggested we make a poster,  much like what Professor Taskin suggested a few weeks ago, of what elements we would put together to make the HDMI transceiver based off of the A/V transmitter and receiver pair we have, as well as block out how the actual function of the transmitter and receiver we have already work.

An example of a similar block diagram was shown to us by Scott, and is displayed below as well.

Above is a block diagram of a AM transmitter.  The microphone converts the audio input (AF) into electrical energy. The driver then amplifies the audio, and the modulator further amplifies the audio signal to the amplitude necessary to fully modulate the carrier.  Adjacent to the AF line, the RF line has a different role before the two lines meet at the power amplifier.  The oscillator creates a wave with a high frequency and sends that wave to the buffer amplifier, which, as presumed, increased the amplitude of the wave, or signal.  Then, when the two waves conjoin, the wave from the AF line and the wave from the RF line, and amplitude modulated signal is created and then sent through the air to presumably the receiver.

For an A/V transmitter and receiver pair, as well as an HDMI transmitter and receiver pair, the format would be a little different, for example the transmitter would probably not be AM, and the video signal would also have to be converted using a video amplifier, driver, and modulator.  For our purposes, the above diagram can be very useful for creating our own template of how we would make out HDMI wireless device, and so we will reference it while creating our final deliverable.

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Week Five

Friday, May 2, 2014

11:09 AM

This week was heavy into reading technical documents on converting an HDMI signal to readable data via PCB board.  Examples of block diagrams demonstrating just that were found on Texas Instruments' website, and are displayed below.

Layout of TMDS Lines Routed on the Bottom Layer

Layout of non-TMDS Lines 

In addition, we looked at the necessary HDMI male plugs needed to actually add the HDMI connector to the board, and found one, as well as a diagram of the piece in a separate PDF with information necessary such as size, resistances, withstanding voltage, and operating temperature.  That PDF combined with the above diagram allows for a fairly comprehensive outline of how and where to connect the male plug to the board.

Along with the circuit information, we also found a new technology for wireless by looking at the teardown of an Alienware gaming computer with wireless HDMI streaming.  The chip used is called the Sibeam SB9220 and has a bandwidth of 4Gbps which is a bit smaller than the IO Gear bandwidth but still does the same job, and as it is a chip as opposed to an entire transceiver, it is more fitted toward the ideal technology that could be used for a wireless HDMI device.  Unfortunately, after discussing the chip with Professor Taskin, we came to learn that adding a chip like that to a PCB board was way too complicated for freshman, as well as many of our other approaches to creating a prototype for our device.

SiBeam SB 9220 Chipset

Instead, our goals for this project ended up changing, and after discussing it with Professor Taskin as well as senior undergraduate Scott Lerner, we came up with a plan to purchase, code and utilize an Arduino kit to substitute for the PCB board that we can't make due to our limited knowledge and resources.  At this point we are trying to gain as much knowledge about wireless HDMI's and other wireless components to best determine the most realistic goal for our final physical product. With this said, we discussed with Professor Taskin about experimenting with an HDMI cable that he found in his house, and looking for AV to either HDMI or DVI to see how the transmitter receiver that we purchased works.

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Week Four

Friday, April 25, 2014

11:10 AM

This week we made a flowchart of the behavioral logic of the transmitter and receiver we purchased in week two so that we could better understand how a transceiver pair works to successfully go through with a task such as sending a video/audio signal over wireless.

Receiver Behavioral Flowchart

           

Transmitter Behavioral Flowchart

 In addition, we also did some more research on different wireless options, and discussed with Professor Taskin the possibility of using Wi-Fi as a wireless utility, and he consulted with some other professors who suggested instead of using the 802.11ac to use a newer version of WiFi such as 802.11n or 802.11w, both recently put on the market.  The group discussed using these technologies, but the obstacles in our way are having to purchase an expensive router, and also needing to purchase a chip to put on the circuit board to actually be able to use the Wi-Fi signal to send 1080p over wireless.  

For week five, our group was asked to do research on IO Gear's HDMI transceiver, specifically by looking for a transmitting frequency and the bandwidth of the device so we would know what kind of wireless we would need for hosting the large bandwidth HDMI requires. In addition, we were asked to look up HDMI wireless tear-downs if available, in addition to DVI and wireless DVI.  However, DVI has an insignificantly smaller bandwidth than that of HDMI, so considering changing to DVI would not be beneficial due to the fact that we would still need a larger bandwidth hosting wireless technology.  

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Week Three

Friday, April 19, 2014

11:07 AM

Zigbee HDMI uses 2.4 GHz, as well as the transmitter and receiver we purchased from eBay as an example

Zigbee-250kbps
Bluetooth-2.1 Mbps

Dr. Taskin showed us how to use Google and Wikipedia for technical research on bandwidth and data rates of HDMI as well as the potential transmitters and receivers we are considering using.  We couldn't find data rates for HDMI so Dr. Taskin suggested suggested the data rates for a similar technology—DVI. To help ingrain exactly how to do this kind of technical research Dr. Tasking demonstrated comparing the rates that Bluetooth and HDMI transfer data.

DVI—4.9 Gbps
HDMI 1080p—1.485 Gbps
HDMI 720p—742.5Mbps
HMDI 480p—270 Mbps

We need to use a type A HDMI connector which is the standard HDMI cable in the industry
HDMI Bandwidth-4.95 Gbps for 1.0 and 10.2 Gbps for 1.3
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDMI#Specifications

The problem that arose while doing research was that the technology we were planning  on using, which is Zigbee, only used 250 kBps, when HDMI required 1.485 Gbs, the equivalent of 1,567,621.1 kbps. In addition, the Bluetooth wireless technology only covers 2.1 Mbps, whereas the bandwidth for HDMI is 1,530 Mbps. Even if we wanted to use a lower resolution, such as 720p or 480p, there isn't enough bandwidth "space" in either Zigbee or Bluetooth, so we have to find a more capable wireless technology that can support HDMI bandwidth.

Professor Taskin suggested investigating some of the pre-existing wireless HDMI technologies out there and finding out what those companies used for handling the large bandwidth required by HDMI, and after doing some research, the most promising alternative was actually Wi-Fi (IEEE 802.11ac), which can transfer a maximum of 6.93 Gbit/s per band. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_USB

 

This greatly differs from the other suggested wireless options, which are Wireless USB (53-48 Mbps), Wi-Fi IEEE 802.11b (450 Mbps), and Bluetooth 4.0 (24 Mbps).  

ZIGBEE
https://docs.zigbee.org/zigbee-docs/dcn/09/docs-09-5131-00-0mwg-zigbee-rf4ce-standard-the-remote-control-standard-for-consumer-electronics.pdf

http://www.zigbee.org/Specifications/ZigBeeRF4CE/Overview.aspx

http://www.commercialintegrator.com/article/when_to_use_zigbee_z-wave

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Week Two

Friday, April 19, 2014

11:09 AM

This week we met with Dr. Taskin and discussed exactly how to go about accomplishing our goal for this project. After conducting research as a group is was discovered that a model of what we are trying to make already exists. There are a few videos on Youtube.com that have the developers as well as consumers discussing the product, its flaws, advantages and prices. The video  embedded below is a review describing a wireless HDMI component that was developed by IO Gear. One of the goals we have for this project is to build off the existing technology and improve it.

As stated in this video the quality of the video diminishes as distance is increased, a predictable problem for a wireless device. To attempt to solve this problem we can experiment and research the effect of using different transmission frequencies from transmitter to receiver.

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Week One

Friday, April 12, 2014

11:04 AM

This week our group went online and researched different A/V transceivers we could purchase to use the wireless technology for in our project.  After looking at several different websites, including Amazon, TigerDirect, and NewEgg, we finally found a transmitter and receiver set on eBay that we could purchase and take apart when it arrived to examine how it worked and determine if it would be helpful to take apart and use the wireless technology in it to make our own wireless HDMI transmitter and receiver.  Below are images of each:

On the right is the receiver and on the left is the transmitter we are going to take apart and examine, as well as potentially use bits and pieces of—particularly the wireless technology.  For our project however, we do not plan on using antennae as of yet.

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