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DCA1000EVM: mmWave studio: Time delay between clicking 'trigger frame' button and the actual start

William Gao
Intellectual 630 points
Part Number: DCA1000EVM
Other Parts Discussed in Thread: AWR1642

Hi,

I have the question above. When I am using the mmWave studio and DCA1000EVM board to capture raw ADC data, I need to click the button 'trigger frame' on mmWavestudio, then the AWR1642 can actually start transmit signal. In this way, I really want to know what's the time delay between the trigger and the actual start. Have you ever estimated it? I think it should be several milliseconds and the exact number would be of great help.

Thanks,

William

  • 0
    TI__Guru*** 140364 points
    Hi,

    The command is sent through the USB PC connection. It will depend on the PC mmWave studio is running on.

    What experiment are you interested in?

    Thank you
    Cesar
  • 0 in reply to Cesar
    Intellectual 630 points

    Hi

    I am using the 'mmWave studio1.0.0.0' under the windows10 environment. I want to make an accurate time label for my data which is collected from the DCA1000 board. Do you have other ways？
    Actually, I think your board and the matching software are not user-friendly. I am very curious about that why you don't provide the time label with the data. That makes more sense in real world!

    Thanks,
    William

  • 0 in reply to William Gao
    TI__Genius 14655 points
    Hi William,

    How accurate of a time label do you want?

    mmWave Studio was designed primarily as a tool for RF evaluation - the absolute time is not normally important in such use-cases.

    Also, as Cesar pointed out, the delay between a GUI button click and the frame start on the EVM depends on software delays and USB transfer delays that are not predictable on the host PC (USB does not guarantee when a command is delivered).

    However if you are looking only for coarse time stamps to associate each raw data capture with a specific capture command, you can easily achieve that by using the mmWave Studio LUA environment to append a timestamp to the filename.

    Best Regards,
    Anand
  • 0 in reply to Anand Gadiyar
    Intellectual 630 points
    Thanks Anand

    I think the time label should be accurate to milliseconds because the durations of frame is tens of milliseconds and frames should be seperated. Any way to achieve that?

    Besides, as you mentioned above, I am not sure of how to append a timestamp to the filename. Can you explain more?

    Thanks,
    William
  • 0 in reply to William Gao
    TI__Genius 14655 points
    Hi William,

    The inter-chirp times can be determined accurately with respect to the start of the frame. The only uncertainty would be the time of the actual start of the frame.

    As we mentioned earlier, this cannot be determined precisely when you use a PC as the host due to uncertainties on the USB bus. It may be better for you to use an external hardware frame trigger from a different device.

    For the other question, mmWaveStudio provides a Lua script interface. You can use LUA commands to read the system time and append that to the filename used for capture. The "ar1.CaptureCardConfig_StartRecord()" command accepts the filename to record to.

    Again, this will not be very accurate anyway.

    Best Regards,
    Anand