Our initial goal was to develop a system that could track a moving receiver and send data to it via a laser to give flight instruction updates to a drone. We quickly realised that sending flight data to a drone would be infeasible because we wouldn't have a good way to know if we were on target or just missing the receiver. As a result we ended up pivoting to sending audio data to a speaker, which has many of the same principals but the quality of the audio (relatively speaking) is a good way to know if the laser is accurately hitting the target. We are also able to eliminate the extra complexities of drone movement by simply moving it by hand and listening for audio.

There were many revisions made along the development process from increasing the effective laser sensing area in the receiver to adjusting the wiring of the transmitter gimbal. They are outlined in greater detail in their respective subsections.

In the end we were able to track the receiver and play a tone whenever the laser was on the receiver. We found the greatest challenge and hindrance to progress to be the difficulties involved in designing a data communication protocol and debugging it. This website documents our process, choices, and progress.