I built a mmWave material classification radar

(gauthier-lechevalier.com)

41 points | by GL26 1 hour ago

4 comments

  • amirhirsch 38 minutes ago
    Very cool! Six years ago I worked on a mmWave (76-81GHz) imaging radar with a Rotman lens Tx and Rx. Designed as a LiDAR replacement, but we could see pipes in walls, or detect concealed weapons at ~1km.
    • mlmonkey 7 minutes ago
      Do you have a writeup about the project? I'd love to read more about it.
    • GL26 34 minutes ago
      How many tx and rx antennas did you have ? (I don’t know if it was clear, my stack was 57-64 GHz, 2TX , 3RX)
      • amirhirsch 12 minutes ago
        32 port Tx (vertical pancake beams) x 16 port Rx (horizontal pancake), something like 60 by 30 degrees. the entire thing used FPGA transceivers as one-bit DAC/ADC, Complementary Golay Code waveforms with one-bit correlation in the FPGAs (two VCU128s) -- digital logic was essentially the same as a binarized neural network, I squeezed a ton of popcnt performance out of those chips using both DSPs and LUTs
  • tim-tday 31 minutes ago
    So thankful the author posted this. We often learn more from failure than success. Learning from the failures of others is how we can move forward. The lessons learned at the bottom of the article are gold.
  • arikrahman 49 minutes ago
    That's awesome. I built one for a capstone back in the day and know how tough it is to get onboarded. Kudos.
  • marking-time 13 minutes ago
    Terrific project!