Other Parts Discussed in Thread: AWR1243
Hello,
We're working with the cascade radar evaluation boards (RF-EVM / DSP-EVM) and are running the real-time MIMO use case - a: Cascade Radar (4 AWR1243) Capture + Radar Object Detect (DSP) + NetworkTx (TDA2xx Only).
We started evaluating initially using the radar_cascade_demo.m MATLAB script, which uses the TFDTP protocol. We found that this would drop over 90% of frames, i.e. effective frame rate was < 1 FPS on average, even with just the point cloud output and irrespective of which core was used for 2D FFTs (DSP or EVM). By looking at the performance stats available through the serial port menu we could see that within 5-10 minutes after power-on the frame rate at SoC side decreased from 6.21 FPS to 2.14 FPS and network TX latency increased from 204 mS to 871 mS.
We have written our own python script, based on the MATLAB script, to allow the radar detection data to be brought into ROS for sensor fusion. However this is showing the same issue, i.e. we never get the full 10 FPS rate and the longer the radar is running since power-on the worse the frame rate/latency get, according to the SoC performance stats.
After reviewing the suggestions in this thread which describes similar issues with the MATLAB script frame rate ( http://e2e.ti.com/support/sensors/f/1023/t/883264 ) we have tried using the Network_RX tool. This is being run at present on a Windows 10 PC. This seems to keep up better with the 10 FPS rate however after 2.5 minutes it hangs as shown below (note that this was with point cloud data only selected on serial port GUI menu), even with retry_count = 5 entered. The performance stats then show the frame rate steadily decreasing from 10 FPS. Also the data rate seems to keep increasing, i.e. starts at 0.71 MB/sec for 1st 10 frames and after 2.5 minutes it is 7.66 MB/sec.
Is there any reason why the data rate should keep increasing like this? Do you think this is related to the issues we are seeing all with the different PC-side interfaces? Can you suggest any fixes for the issues we're having?
