Author: Simona Ranieri

EDUCATIONAL OBJECTIVES:
The objectives of the course are:
1) to provide the tools to carry out a radio link assessment in a real application context.
2) learn the fundamental parameters of the antennas used in IoT applications
3) provide the tools to interpret the electrical diagram of the RF front end of a typical trans receiver.

KNOWLEDGE AND UNDERSTANDING:
Provide the fundamental tools to understand the most advanced and updated content from publications, magazines, forums, blogs, etc., to always be updated on the state of the art.

ABILITY TO APPLY KNOWLEDGE AND UNDERSTANDING:
practical radio link budget, electronic noise evaluation on receiver behaviour, installation effects of the antennas, understanding of key parameters of commonly used antennas in the targeted scenario, analysis of an RF transceiver block diagram

AUTONOMY OF JUDGMENT:
In the enormous amount of information that is available today to developers of IoT applications, the course seeks to develop in the student the ability to select the highest quality and most validated content.

COMMUNICATION SKILLS:
The final test is based on an oral exam in which the student illustrates a part of the module

LEARNING ABILITY:
The course aims to develop in the student the ability to independently learn new and constantly updated content because the knowledge acquired today soon becomes obsolete.

SYLLABUS:

(Longhi):

Introduction to radiating elements and their key parameters.
Ideal and practical link budget.
The effect of noise in electronic receivers, figures of merit and mathematical modelling. Receiver G/T.
Practical aspects of IoT RF systems
RFID
Radiating elements key parameters, gain, directivity, HPBW, nulls, radiation pattern, polarization, and input impedance. Some practical cases: the mono/di-pole family, microstrip antennas, parabolic reflector, wearables
Introduction to RF transceiver systems and key-components (switches, HPA, LNA, mixers, frequency generators).

(G.Orengo):

Summary of Digital Electronics: digital encoding of information, binary (fixed and floating point), hexadecimal and ASCII; operators and main logic circuits, registers and memories, programmable devices. Prototyping boards for IoT (Arduino, Rasberry), Systems on Chip (SoC), architecture of a microcontroller, description of the Arduino Uno board. Programming languages ​​(assembly, compiled, interpreted), structure of an Arduino sketch (libraries, setups, loops, functions, interrupts), programming elements in C (variables, math and logical operations, cycles, conditional statements). Use of digital and analog I/O ports (A/D conversion, PWM output). Synchronous and asynchronous serial communication modes, wired (USB) and wireless with Bluetooth, RF and WiFi modules. Remote control of electronic modules (sensors, dc stepper and servo motors, LED/LCD displays etc.) from portable devices (Windows, IoS), through applications developed in Processing and Python, and mobile (Android), through Apps developed with the MIT App Inventor platform. Internet protocols for device local/remote control through WiFi modules connected as access points/clients to web platforms or public/private cloud servers controlled by laptops and/or mobile devices.

(G.Cardarilli):

– Introduction to the Internet of Things (IoT) and embedded systems
– Wireless and mobile communications
– The Sensors
– Low power processing
– IoT and machine learning applications
– Future developments in the field of IoT and embedded systems