Overview

Week 15 marked a major milestone as VertexShell transitioned from a lab prototype to real-world field deployment. Armed with fully assembled hardware, functional software, and our first batch of 3D-printed enclosures, the team conducted environmental and communication testing to evaluate sensor accuracy, LoRa mesh stability, and mechanical durability in a simulated industrial environment.

What We Did

• First-Article Enclosure Printing: Finalized our CAD updates using last week’s exact measurements and successfully 3D-printed our first operational, ruggedized PETG enclosure prototypes.
• Full-System Integration Assembly: Secured the fully populated custom PCBs inside the new 3D-printed shells, officially assembling our first batch of complete, self-contained VertexShell field nodes.
• Environmental Field Testing: Deployed the completed units outdoors in a simulated site environment to evaluate how the physical packaging handles ambient conditions while keeping the sensors properly exposed to air currents.
• LoRa Range & Mesh Validation: Conducted extensive distance and obstacle testing with our LoRa transceivers, mapping data packet delivery rates across various ranges to stress-test our multi-node routing protocol.

Challenges

• Real-World Signal Obstruction: During distance testing, structural obstacles like concrete walls and metal fencing caused a higher drop in LoRa signal strength than our indoor simulations predicted. This required us to look into tweaking our transmission power settings and optimizing node placement heights to maintain line-of-sight propagation.
• Physical Packet Latency: When testing multi-node hops over extended field distances, we noticed an increase in total packet transmission latency, meaning data took longer than expected to jump from the furthest node back to the central hub.

Next Steps

• Adjust the software’s LoRa transmission power configurations and routing tables to overcome real-world industrial structural interference.
• Optimize the mesh network protocol’s hop timing parameters in code to reduce latency during multi-node data relays.
• Compile and analyze all sensor telemetry and packet delivery logs from this week’s deployment to prepare our final technical validation report.