AWR2243BOOST: Can`t activate mmWave Demo Visualizer

Hi,

Could I ask if you saw "Done" printed on the UART console after every command?

Regards,

Aayush

Hi, Thanks for the response

Nothing is printed on the Console.

I tried to connect to the serial ports manually from terminal, when connected to the CFG_Port i get a blank screen and when connected to the Data port i get a constant stream of unidentified characters.

Hello Team,

Daniel is a customer i'm supporting.

I understand from another e2e thread that AWR2243BOOST doesn't support mmWave Demo Visualizer

how should customer proceed with evaluating? they have the AWR2243BOOST board + AM2732R board

Hi,

The demo visualizer does support AWR2243+AM273. So the setup mentioned here should work.

The OOB demo is not supposed to start transmitting data on the auxiliary data port on startup without receiving the appropriate CLI commands over user UART first.

Also, on reset, you should see a banner appear on the user UART COM port with the out of box demo. Could you reset the device with the NRESET button while monitoring the user UART COM port via Teraterm/PuTTY/etc, and confirm that?

Finally, I wanted to confirm that the out of box demo has indeed been flashed onto the device. Have you flashed the out of box demo from the SDK onto the device? The name is a little misleading in that it is not guaranteed that the out of box demo will be flashed on the device from the outset.

Regards,

Aayush

Hi,

I mounted the AWR2243 on top of the AM2732, and connected them to the power source.

When i connect the ftdi and XDS usb from the AM2732 to the PC i get no connection on the mmWave demo, also when connecting directly to the user UART COM port i get nothing. On TI dev cloud CCS The device is not recognized so i can't flash the device.

When i connect the XDS usb from the AWR2243 to the PC i get "hardware connected" from the mmWave demo but nothing shows on the console screen. When connected directly to the user UART COM port i also see nothing but on  the Data COM port i get a constant stream of undefined characters.

I also tried connecting to the AWR2243 using mmWave Studio, i managed to connect, Load the BSS and MSS FW but i got stuck on the "SPI connect" with the error:

"Status: Failed, Error Type: RADAR INTERFACE ERROR"

"MSS Power Up async event was not received!"

I browsed related issues on the Forum but nothing worked for me, I also tried all SOP modes on both boards so that's probably not the problem.

Thanks.

Hi,

I might have an idea on what the issue is. We have observed issues connecting through XDS if the FTDI USB is also connected. Could you just connect the XDS cable and try this?

Additionally, if there is a JTAG_MUX switch on the EVM, could you ensure that this is switched to the XDS side, and not the MIPI side?

Regards,

Aayush

Thanks for the quick response,

The JTAG_MUX is on the XDS side, The situation remains when the FTDI usb is disconnected

Hi Daniel,

Daniel Mizrahi said:

On TI dev cloud CCS The device is not recognized so i can't flash the device.

This might be the issue. AWR2243+AM273 does not use Uniflash for flashing. Could you download the latest SDK (4.2.0.2, which was released last week), and refer to the user guide for flashing instructions? After successfully flashing the OOB demo from the latest SDK, could you try connecting the demo visualizer? Also note that the baud rate for the auxiliary data COM port is not standard (i.e. 921600). You will have to refer to the user guide for the appropriate baud rate to be used.

Regards,

Aayush

Hi,

I can't find this version of the SDK for download, on the ti website the latest version is 03.05.00.04.

Can you direct me to the right place?

Hi,

SDK 3.5 only supports first generation devices. For second generation devices, you can find the mmWave MCU+ SDK here: https://www.ti.com/tool/MMWAVE-MCUPLUS-SDK

Regards,

Aayush

Hi,

Thanks for all the help, the new SDK solved most of our issues, we flashed the OOB demo and manged to get connectivity with the mmWaveDemo app but when we try sending config we get an error on the console:

"""

mmwDemo:/>sensorStart
Error: openCfg has iqSwapSel = 0, which is not supported. Please check dataFormatCfg!!
Error -1

"""

This despite of that the dataFormatConfig option sent correctly, with iqSwapSel = 1.

When we try to override this problem and load the a config file from PC( in the Plots tab), we sometimes succeed and can see the radar signals on the plots, and sometimes we get a console message that some of the config command are not recognized, this happens because for some reason some characters are lost.

"""

mmwDemo:/>rofileCfg 0 77 267 7 57.14 0 0 70 1 256 5209 0 0 30
'rofileCfg' is not recognized as a CLI command

"""

The config is taken from the sdk and it is correct but when sending it to the mmWaveDemo it omits some digits, on every loading up of the config it omits some other charaters.

I thought this has something to do with the baud rates, I tried changing the baud rate of the CFG_PORT but it didn`t help

have you encountered this problem before?

Hi Daniel,

This is not a usual problem. The baud rate for the user UART port should be 115200. 

Since you can see the output in the plots in some cases, it means that the USB cable is fine. 

Could I ask you to run this once on a different PC, with Chrome as the browser?

Regards,

Aayush

Hi Aayush,

I tried running this on a windows machine and a linux machine, i tried using chrome, firefox and the local installation of the visualizer, the problem persist on all.

i guessed it have something to do with the baud rate but i don't really know what is the problem.  

Hi Daniel,

Sorry for the delay, I had been out of office this entire week, and will rejoin on Monday. On Monday I will try this on my end and talk to the SDK team about the observed issue. I am curious, has there been any progress on this on your end?

Thanks & Regards,

Aayush

Hi,

Unfortunately there was no progress on that issue, we are still having the same problem.

Hi  Aayush,

Is there any progress on your side regarding our problem?

In addition to that we want to run our own chain of processes on raw data from the radar, is there a preferable way to do this?

We flashed the TDM_LVDS demo on our device, according to the SDK user guide in order to record raw data i need to use DCA1000 EVM CLI commands which does not work ( we do not have the DCA1000 board). following the user guide ended with no result on that matter.

We were wondering whether  the demo visualizer receives raw ADC data and calculate the range azimuth, doppler etc.  or does the computation of those maps is done on the device itself and sent to the demo visualizer afterwards?

Hi,

I accidentally marked this as resolved.

I tried all the TDM demos in the sdk, the problem persist in all. I use the latest SDK version 4.2.0.2 and the same version of the mmWave visualizer.

Hi Daniel,

As per our discussion over call today, please let me know the results of what happens when Teraterm/PuTTY is used to send the .cfg file out line by line.

If the error is not observed when sending configurations over PuTTY, it means that there is an issue with the visualizer running on your PC, and we can direct our debugging efforts there.

In the meantime, I am working on getting an AM273+AWR2243 setup running on my end to test the visualizer (though the SDK team would certainly have tried doing this on their end).

Regards,

Aayush

Hi Aayush,

I tried sending the config line by line using PuTTY, it transmit every command properly and sends back Done.

when i send the sensorStart command it outputs:

"Debug: Init Calibration status = 0x1ffe

Done"

Hi Daniel,.

<Edit begin>

This indicates that the issue is with the visualizer and not the connection from the PC to device/the device itself. In addition, a member of the SDK team tested this, and this issue doesn't occur in our setup, hence it is a little difficult to debug. It is possible that the visualizer in combination with some other software running on your machine could be causing this.

<Edit end>

I am going to follow this up with the team responsible for creating the TI CloudAgent and TI CloudAgent bridge who provide the UART libraries used in the visualizer, but for the time being, I want to propose the following workaround:

Could you add two or three spaces to the beginning of every line in the CFG file and try sending that? On the embedded side, the application removes any whitespaces in the beginning of the string, so doing this should work, and also handle the case where the first character is dropped.

Could you please let me know if this unblocks you?

Regards,

Aayush

Hi,

Because we ran it on several machines including windows and Linux, i don't think it have something to do with some unrelated software.

Adding spaces or tab did not solve the issue.

You didn't address the error we are receiving when trying to send config via the send config button, maybe this will help finding the bug.

"""

mmwDemo:/>sensorStart
Error: openCfg has iqSwapSel = 0, which is not supported. Please check dataFormatCfg!!
Error -1

"""

This despite of that the dataFormatConfig option sent correctly, with iqSwapSel = 1.

Hi Daniel,

This is indeed a bug in the demo visualizer. I have flagged it to the SDK team, and it should get resolved by Monday.

Edit:

By this I mean the iqswapsel issue will be fixed by Monday. We are still trying to figure out why the first character of .cfg file will be dropped like this.

Regards,

Aayush

Hi Daniel,

The iqswapsel bug was fixed. Could you check the same on your end and let me know?

Regards,

Aayush

Hi,

It seems that the iqswapsel bug was fixed, both on the Linux and Windows machines, thank you for your help.

Hi Daniel,

Thank you for the confirmation.

Can I ask if the first character of UART being skipped also happens when using the GUI to directly send commands?

The TI CloudAgent team came back to me with the following suggested steps to gather some data on the skipped character issue:

"""

I think the best way to start might be to collect some extra logging information.

First level of logging would take place on the browser side, you would need to open Browser’s Developer Tools (usually F12). Then switch to console tab and enter command : gc.console.setCookie('all',5)

This should start printing more information in the console tab. It would be useful to enable this logging, reproduce the issue and then copy the output and paste to a text file.

Second layer of logging would take place in Cloud Agent, that is the component that loads the Serial communication component. You would need to open

"C:\Users\{UserLoginID}\TICloudAgent\ticloudagent.bat" in a text editor, and uncomment line 4 and 5 , paths may need to be adjusted if C:/temp is not correct path on local system.

I think there would be my_ticld.log log file that would be useful to get.

Cloud Agent logging can capture quite a bit of data. Thus please remember to disable it once done capturing logs.

"""

Regards,

Aayush