Gain pattern tester

Well, I’ve done various changes in this last hour. First and foremost, we now have proper saving and loading of calibration files, as well as a constant output of the measurements, which are checked are correct!!! :D

I have also taken the liberty of experimenting a bit with Smith Charts, and they were indeed pretty fun and correct. So apart from this, I guess I can now start designing the mount for the antenna and the ESP32 circuitry that will control it… Let’s hope it goes alright!!! >:3

Originally I had planned for the second devlog to already include a bit of me rambling about a manual prototype where I spin the antenna and the nanoVNA goes about taking measurements, but, calibration is a thing, and a painful thing too. I also wanted to make it so that it caught whenever the VNA was not connected to the computer, and that was surprisingly hard lol. I also found out the hard way the library has a lot of other restrictions, that hopefully I can kink out with my implementation… Anyways, now the calibration is going, next step is being able to save and load this calibration, mainly for testing (I don’t even know if I’ll do this lol) and afterwards (or just directly) I’ve gotta make it so that we can have a “manual spin” of the antenna. Let’s hope my idea goes well… :3

Well this was mostly trying to experiment with how to communicate with the LiteVNA I’ve got. I experimented a bit with serial communication but the protocol isn’t the easiest so for now I’ve decided I’m gonna do the initial testing with the pynanovna library, which should make the job a bit easier at the start, even though I plan on eventually porting all this to most likely pure C code to be honest. Let’s see where this goes, I guess…