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AWR1843BOOST: Help with setting up radar with accurate timing

Bradley Stanley-Clamp
Prodigy 50 points
Part Number: AWR1843BOOST
Other Parts Discussed in Thread: AWR1843

Hi, I am attempting to put the AWR1843 and DCA1000 on a rover (ROSbot). As the rover moves I want to as accurately as possible obtain the location of each radar pulse. I am very new to this area and would appreciate any advice or reference to documents that could be useful. 

Firstly in terms of concept I currently have two ideas, which one, if any, would be better?

1. Trigger the radar at a known time point, have the radar constantly producing chirps at a known time interval (if this is possible?). From this I can then work out the time stamp of each chirp and link it to the location from here?

2. As the rover moves trigger a single chirp at fixed time points, I will be wanting a lot of chirps in a small period of time, so I am unsure if it is possible to have such a high trigger rate?

Then in terms of details, I have been using the mmWave Studio for my testing so far and this has left me with a few questions:

1. Can I trigger an continuous amount of chirps? 

2. How accurate is the trigger time to the first chirp?

3. Is there a way of setting up and triggering the radar without using mmWave Studio?

Thankyou for all your help 

  • 0
    TI__Guru*** 149944 points

    Hi,

    The chirp configuration has a known time interval. Please see the following AppNote www.ti.com/.../swra553a.pdf

    Bradley Stanley-Clamp said:
    1. Trigger the radar at a known time point, have the radar constantly producing chirps at a known time interval (if this is possible?). From this I can then work out the time stamp of each chirp and link it to the location from here?

    Bradley Stanley-Clamp said:

    2. As the rover moves trigger a single chirp at fixed time points, I will be wanting a lot of chirps in a small period of time, so I am unsure if it is possible to have such a high trigger rate?

    Then in terms of details, I have been using the mmWave Studio for my testing so far and this has left me with a few questions:

    1. Can I trigger an continuous amount of chirps? 

    2. How accurate is the trigger time to the first chirp?

    3. Is there a way of setting up and triggering the radar without using mmWave Studio?

    There are two ways to trigger frames

    • Hardware trigger
    • Software trigger.

    Software trigger is easier because it is performed through sw configuration. However the start is less accurate because the trigger happens through sending a command.

    Please search this forum for more information using google site search, for example.

    site e2e.ti.com hardware trigger

    With DCA1000 capture it is not possible to trigger without mmWave Studio.

    Thank you

    Cesar

  • 0 in reply to Cesar
    Prodigy 50 points

    Thankyou for your response, I have a few follow up questions 

    1. Can I confirm regardless of the trigger type I will need to have the DCA plugged into a PC running mmWave Studio? 

    2. Do you have an approximate value for the time delay of the software trigger?

    3. Does the mmWave Studio give a timestamp of when the software trigger is triggered. 

    4. In regards to the chirp configuration, from what I can see this is the chirp cycle time which is the sum of idle time and ramp end time?.

    so if I had 80 frames each of 27 chirps with an idle time of 7us and a ramp end time of 58.57us the overall time taken would be: 80*27*(7+58.57)us? 

    5. Where can I find documentation on how to setup the hardware trigger, so far all I can see is E2E posts?

    thankyou in advance

  • 0 in reply to Bradley Stanley-Clamp
    TI__Mastermind 20605 points

    Hi Bradley,

    1. The DCA1000 is used to capture the LVDS data from the mmWave device and send the same to PC over ethernet and the PC application used to control this entire flow is the mmWave Studio. So, yes, you will need to use the Studio to trigger captures over the DCA1000.
    2. We do not have an exact number of cycles, but it will be in the order of a few microseconds excluding the overhead from the Studio application running on windows.
    3. It gives a timestamp of when the DCA framing is triggered, and this will be in the order of seconds.
    4. Total chirp time = Chirp active time + Idle time where chirp active time = Ramp end time - ADC start time
    5. This would be correct, but you need to account for start of the chirp as well (where it is nonzero)
    6. You can look at the radar interface control document to see how to configure it to hardware trigger and the data sheet will mention which pins to provide the trigger signal to.

    Regards,
    Kaushik