AWR1843BOOST: Out of box demo project debugging procedure.

Hi:

Thank you again, I may try this soom.

Actually I do find a document that introduce how to use UART to get the ADC data out for AWR6843. I think that may also be helpful for me to debug the whole processing chain. Do we have any demo code that allows me to transmit ADC data through UART for AWT1843boost as well?

Best

Kevin

Hi Samhitha:

I have tried your suggestion to set "number of frames" parameter to 1 instead of 0 but I still cannot debug at the breakpoint after 1DFFT. 

Maybe I should clarify my goal so you can provide me a better option. My goal is try to get the raw ADC signal or at least signal that is close to ADC for some initial development, and to get locate the signal that output from the DPC (which is sent to the PC for visualization). I understand that get the full-speed raw ADC data requires a high-speed DAC card (DAC1000), however it is hard for me to order a new one now for some reason so I have to develop the whole thing with the AWR1843boost card. My main tasks can be summarized as following points here:

• try to locate the radar signal flow in out-of-box demo project code. 
• try to use  UART to pull out the raw ADC data for one single frame (I can lower the ADC refresh rate, UART is <3.125Mbps so technically I should be able to send the ADC signal through UART below this rate).
• try to locate the DPC output signal result in out-of-box demo project code. 

For point 2. I have googled around the internet and  there is only one reference document from TI China E2E forum that gives an exmaple to show how to do it with xWR6843 but In E2E english forum I cannot see any related topic. If you can evaluate the method provided by the document is valid, that would be very helpful. I have attached the document (ZHCAB69-12. 2021, by Wesley He Central FAE)

 ZHCAB69.pdf

Best Regard

Kevin

Hi Kevin,

I am out of office. I will check your reply and get back to you on next Tuesday.

Regards,

Samhitha

Hi Samhitha:

Yes I can briefly express the method in the document.

The document is target on the device 6843, which I think is very similar to 1843. The document mentioned that using UART to transmit raw ADC data in real time is almost impossible due to the high data rate, but it mentioned that if we set the frame rate to 1Hz, the data rate should meet the UART data rate. For example, (128(ADC samples per chirp) * 128(Chirps per frame)*4(RX channel)*4(IQ data bytes)*1(Frames per second) * 8(8bits)) / (3.125Mbps * 0.8(transmission loss)) = 0.83s. Here the document mentiones the UART rate needs to achieve 3Mbps, I guess that is the highest rate for UART. 

The document shows that to realize such setting, it suggests to configure the UART and DMA accordingly (Section 2.3, code in Page 7), and it also modify the TLV codes (add new parts in TLV codes) to make sure the ADC data is transmitted with TLV just as demo code in SDK. It mentioned to read the ADC data, we should read the L3 memory start from address 0x5100_0000 because it is where the ADC data stored (Section 2.4). Then, it modify the rangeprochwa.c code which turns of the fft enable and window enable to make sure ADC raw data passes through HWA without any processing. These are almost all the modification suggested in the document. Rest parts (section 2.6) are modification for the GUI python code, which I don't care a lot since I can always make a new code to read the data from UART. 

So in general, I would like to know if these method can somehow create a setup that allow me to pull the ADC data from the SoC. 

Best

Kevin