• State Resolved
  • Locked Locked
  • Replies 5 replies
  • Subscribers 30 subscribers
  • Views 265 views
  • Users 0 members are here
Support feedback
Options
Options
Similar topics

This thread has been locked.

If you have a related question, please click the "Ask a related question" button in the top right corner. The newly created question will be automatically linked to this question.

AWR6843ISK: Basic Doppler processing (non FMCW)

Enrique Casado
Prodigy 20 points
Part Number: AWR6843ISK
Other Parts Discussed in Thread: AWR6843, AWRL6432

Hi,

We're starting the development of an mmWave, autonomous (solar powered) radar device. We acquired the evaluation kit for the AWR6843 to start testing the FMCW techology capabilities for our application (traffic monitoring), and so far we're happy with the results.

However, power consumption is relatively high for our use case, so we thought of an strategy based on using the full capabilities of the radar when battery is high enough (FMCW, range, velocity and angle measurment) and switch to a power-saving mode where only speed is measured using basic doppler effect when battery is low.

We were trying to figure out if it's possible to use this device in "basic Doppler" mode (meaning, compute the difference between a continuous transmitted and received wave, sampling the IF and compute the FFT). So far we can't find any example or indication that does this.

Best regards and have a nice weekend,

Enrique

  • 0
    TI__Genius 15891 points

    Hi Enrique, 

    My apologies for the delayed response. I'm checking to see if we have any examples for this and will get back to you.

    Best Regards,

    Josh

  • 0 in reply to Josh Dye
    Prodigy 20 points

    Thank you Josh, no worries. We'll be looking forward to your reply.

    On the other hand, as an alternative solution to reduce power consumption, we've noticed that the new AWRL6432 is significantly lower power than the AWR6843, but since it's pretty new (still on preview) the docs and examples are not there yet.

    What can you tell us about compatibilty (feature and code wise) between 6843 and L6432? We would be interested in running something similar to the Traffic Monitoring demo on it.

    Best regards,

    Enrique

  • 0 in reply to Josh Dye
    Prodigy 20 points

    Hi again Josh,

    In the meantime, we found this topic with the exact same question, and it seems that in the IWR1642 this is not supported because of the filter chain in the RF stage. Since this stage is mostly the same in the AWR6843, most likely we won't be able to use CW Doppler here either.

    Waiting for your confirmation anyways.

    Enrique

  • +1 in reply to Enrique Casado
    TI__Genius 15891 points

    Hi Enrique, 

    My apologies for the delay. Yes, Nitin's response in the thread you linked sums up why this is not possible with our devices. 

    Enrique Casado said:
    What can you tell us about compatibilty (feature and code wise) between 6843 and L6432? We would be interested in running something similar to the Traffic Monitoring demo on it.

    Main differences for L6432 include:

    • Slower clock for ARM core
    • No DSP
    • less transmit and receive antennae
    • optimized power architecture enabling much lower power

    Code wise the devices are not compatible. The xWRL6432 uses mmWave L SDK 5.x. The traffic monitoring example would need to be ported to the new SDK. And since that demo uses the 6843's DSP you would need to implement the same processing without the DSP. xWRL6432's hardware accelerator can be used to perform the required radar processing. I think a good starting point would be the mmWave Demo (<MMWAVE_SDK5_INSTALL_DIR>/examples/mmw_demo/mmwave_demo) which implements a range-doppler based processing chain on xWRL6432. This demo can be seen as an Out-of-Box demo from which you can add/remove features as needed. 

    In summary, it is definitely possible to port the traffic monitoring demo to the low power xWRL6432 device but due to the features mentioned above the effective detection range will be much less. 

    Best Regards,

    Josh

  • 0 in reply to Josh Dye
    Prodigy 20 points

    Understood. Thanks for your support!

    We'll check if we're able to do the porting.

    Best regards,

    Enrique