DCA1000EVM: How to connect multiple sensors to 1 PC?

Dag Malstaf

Part Number: DCA1000EVM
Other Parts Discussed in Thread: AWR2243

Tool/software:

Dear,

I would like to connect a second DCA1000EVM to my PC and read data from two sensors at the same time. As far as I know the IP addresses and ports are hardcoded for the FPGA of the DCA1000EVM. So if its possible, how should I connect a second module?

Any help regarding this would be very helpful!

Thanks in advance.

Best regards,

Dag

over 1 year ago

0 aozer over 1 year ago

TI__Mastermind 30955 points

Hello,

Unfortunately, there is no way to do this. Both DCA1000 use the same IP address so you cannot connect two of them to a single PC.

Also, you cannot have multiple instances of mmWave Studio opened at the same time so this will also prevent you from connecting to multiple sensors.

Regards,

Adrian

0 Dag Malstaf over 1 year ago in reply to aozer

Prodigy 120 points

Hello,

But as stated in this post it seems to be possible to run a command to change the hardcoded IP address. My guess was that it should thus be possible to listen to more then 1 sensor?

Best regards,

Dag

0 aozer over 1 year ago in reply to Dag Malstaf

TI__Mastermind 30955 points

Where did you see this? As far as I am aware we have never supported mutliple DCA.

Regards,

Adrian

0 Dag Malstaf over 1 year ago in reply to aozer

Prodigy 120 points

This post:
e2e.ti.com/.../iwr1443-dca1000-programming-to-change-ip-address

0 Dag Malstaf over 1 year ago in reply to aozer

Prodigy 120 points

Could you maybe tell how the ar1 commands are send to the radar? Over what ports and communication protocol is this done? If I know this then maybe it would be possible to send ar1 commands to the radar while bypassing the mmwave studio environment?

0 aozer over 1 year ago in reply to Dag Malstaf

TI__Mastermind 30955 points

Hello,

I have not seen that before and have not seen others use that, so it is new to me.

The ar1 commands are sent through the LUA shell based on LUA 5.1.

Lua 5.1 Reference Manual - contents

However, these commands are a library of APIs which are locked into studio and defined in the AR1xController.dll file found in C:\ti\mmwave_studio_<version_number>\mmWaveStudio\RunTime directory. You cannot access them or modify them yourself.

mmWave Studio has a built in lua shell which you can use without having to interact with the GUI. You can search E2E or look in the studio user guide to see how to use the lua shell.

You can try following the steps in the E2E you have linked, but even if this works it does not change the fact that studio cannot communicate with multiple devices at once (with the exception of AWR2243 cascade). You could maybe look into the mmWave Studio CLI tool to see if you can get it to work for your use case. However, we have not tested or tried this so it is up to you to try to get it to work. This is not a use case we officially support.

mmWave Studio CLI Developers Guide (ti.com)

Regards,

Adrian

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DCA1000EVM: How to connect multiple sensors to 1 PC?