Before assembling all the PCBs for the entire system, steps are taken to test the design first. The dynamic tags include battery charging and power management circuitry that must be tested before attaching the rest of the components as shown in the picture below.
After the circuit was able to do a complete charge cycle while the battery voltage is constantly monitored, the rest of the components are assembled onto the PCB.
Now, we move onto the static tag PCB. A similar process is carried on where each individual group of components is tested prior to moving onto the next section of the PCB, the fully assembled PCB is shown in the image below.
After both a static and a dynamic tag are assembled a test is made for the distance algorithm to ensure the feasibility of the project as shown in the picture below.
The distance measurements shown below are collected at the same time as the picture above.
The distance only varies by 10 cm which is great for RF based distance measurements. This de-risks any possible issues that may arise from the distance measurements which the entire project is based on. Now, I need to pull a full work day to get the rest of the PCBs assembled, we need two dynamic tags and four static tags to fully test the system.