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Original question:

IWR6843ISK: Hardware Trigger For IWR6843ISK (No MMWAVEICBOOST)

IWR6843AOPEVM: IWR6843AOPEVM

Josh Huai
Prodigy 20 points
Part Number: IWR6843AOPEVM
Other Parts Discussed in Thread: IWR6843ISK, IWR6843AOP, MMWAVE-STUDIO, MMWAVEICBOOST, IWR1843BOOST, SK-TDA4VM, TDA4VM, DCA1000EVM

Tool/software:

I am looking to trigger the frame capture of the IWR6843AOPEVM as I have seen several people have successfully done that.

For instance, [with IWR6843AOPEVM here](https://e2e.ti.com/support/sensors-group/sensors/f/sensors-forum/1231464/iwr6843aopevm-hardware-triggering-sync_in-pulse-requirements)

and [with IWR6843ISK here](https://e2e.ti.com/support/sensors-group/sensors/f/sensors-forum/1039687/mmwaveicboost-mmwave-studio-calling_connecttarget-returned-3-error)

and [with IWR6843ISK again](https://e2e.ti.com/support/sensors-group/sensors/f/sensors-forum/972613/iwr6843isk-hardware-trigger ).

I have gone through these discussions, the relevant SDK link, and the schematics for IWR6843AOP. 

But I still have some upfront questions.

1. where is the SYNC_IN pin on IWR6843AOPEVM if it exists? Do I need a DCA boost carrier board for sync?

2. I have seen some post about replacing resistors from the DCA carrier board for sync, I guess we don't need to do that for IWR6843AOPEVM, right?

3. We need 3.3V PWM signals to SYNC_IN, right?

Thank you for your clarification,

  • 0
    TI__Expert 8275 points

    Hi Josh,

    Josh Huai said:
    1. where is the SYNC_IN pin on IWR6843AOPEVM if it exists? Do I need a DCA boost carrier board for sync?

    The IWR6843AOPEVM does not have a SYNC_IN in pin or test point. The SYNC_IN signal is routed to DCA1000 board or MMWAVEICBOOST board to provide hardware trigger using the MMWAVE-STUDIO software. Either you may use DCA1000 or ICBOOST board along with IWR6843AOPEVM to provide SYNC_IN using MMWAVE STUDIO software (OR) you will need to tap in the SYNC_IN signal at RA8A or R157 to blue wire and provide hardware trigger externally using a signal generator. 

    In case, you are using STUDIO software, trigger select should be Hardware instead of software, see below.

    Josh Huai said:
    2. I have seen some post about replacing resistors from the DCA carrier board for sync, I guess we don't need to do that for IWR6843AOPEVM, right?

    As explained above, if you wish to tap in the SYNC_IN signal at RA8A or R157 to blue wire and provide hardware trigger externally using a signal generator you will not need DCA1000 board. DCA1000 board would be feasible to provide HW_TRIGGER without any additional blue wiring.

    Josh Huai said:
    3. We need 3.3V PWM signals to SYNC_IN, right?

    Yes, we will need 3.3V PWM signal to provide HW trigger to SYNC_IN. Below are few additional timing requirements that needs to be followed.

    Regards

    Ankit

  • 0 in reply to Ankit Mohanty
    Prodigy 20 points

    Hi Ankit, Thank you for the prompt response.

    Yes. For the 3 options mentioned by you, I am familiar with

    a. DCA1000(https://www.ti.com/tool/DCA1000EVM),

    first time to know

    b. ICBOOST(https://www.ti.com/tool/MMWAVEICBOOST )

    interested more in

    c.  tap in the SYNC_IN signal at RA8A or R157 to blue wire

    since we want to keep our sensor suite small.

    We used a microcontroller chip to provide 10Hz PWM wave as the trigger signal.

    The high voltage duration in each cycle of the PWM is 4us, per the discussions at [here](https://e2e.ti.com/support/sensors-group/sensors/f/sensors-forum/1231464/iwr6843aopevm-hardware-triggering-sync_in-pulse-requirements ).

    also I have seen some people report triggering success as "I did run the radar with a hardware trigger at pulse width 50 us and  the rise time 3.51 us!" (https://e2e.ti.com/support/sensors-group/sensors/f/sensors-forum/972613/iwr6843isk-hardware-trigger )

    I found RA8A or R157 in the Design Files 6843 Rev G_PROC091G at (https://e2e.ti.com/support/sensors-group/sensors/f/sensors-forum/1122617/iwr6843aopevm-is-there-design-file-for-iwr6843aopevm-rev-g?tisearch=e2e-sitesearch&keymatch=iwr6843aop%252520rev%252520g ) The 3D PCB in pdf is beautiful.

    So RA8A is at J2 22pin, and R157 is at J11 16pin.

    1. If I connect my PWM wave pin to the J2 22pin and my ground pin to the J2 ground pin say 20,

    the wiring for triggering will be completed, right?

    2. BTW, what is blue wire? Pardon me for the seemingly naive question as I don't want to ruin the board by ignorant hacking.

    Thank you for the assistance.

  • +1 in reply to Josh Huai
    TI__Expert 8275 points

    Hi,

    Josh Huai said:
    The high voltage duration in each cycle of the PWM is 4us

    The high voltage duration should be of 1us for IWR6843AOP device. Please see the clarification at the end of thread.

    Josh Huai said:
    I found RA8A or R157 in the Design Files 6843 Rev G_PROC091G at (https://e2e.ti.com/support/sensors-group/sensors/f/sensors-forum/1122617/iwr6843aopevm-is-there-design-file-for-iwr6843aopevm-rev-g?tisearch=e2e-sitesearch&keymatch=iwr6843aop%252520rev%252520g ) The 3D PCB in pdf is beautiful.

    You can find the circuit schematic and assembly file in the below design file to locate RA8A and R157 in the IWR6843AOPEVM board.

    https://www.ti.com/lit/zip/swrr166

    Josh Huai said:
    So RA8A is at J2 22pin, and R157 is at J11 16pin.

    Yes, that is correct.

    Josh Huai said:

    1. If I connect my PWM wave pin to the J2 22pin and my ground pin to the J2 ground pin say 20,

    the wiring for triggering will be completed, right?

    Yes. the understanding is correct. However, HW triggering should be selected in the MMWAVE-STUDIO software Trigger Select option for the device to recognize that each frame would be triggered by rising edge of the SYNC_IN pulse and not software API. 

    Josh Huai said:
    2. BTW, what is blue wire? Pardon me for the seemingly naive question as I don't want to ruin the board by ignorant hacking.

    Blue wiring is a neutral wire that carries electricity away from an appliance. Like bringing out either male or female header pin/ jumper at the end of the circuit or at the location where the signal needs to be tapped in.

    Regards

    Ankit

  • +1 in reply to Ankit Mohanty
    Prodigy 20 points

    Thank you very much, Ankit. I think you have resolved my issue. I will get my hands dirty to carry out the plan.

    Edit:

    Today I tried out the plan with a Microcontroller and a IWR6843AOPEVM, but it did not work.

    Here is my setup

    I plugged a samtec cable to the ICBoost socket(J2) on IWR6843AOPEVM, the pin 20 and pin 22 of J2 are ground, and sync_in, resp,

    I picked out the two wires for the two pins from the cable and connected them to the microcontroller pins that outputs 20 Hz PWM with 3.3 V duration at 1 us.

    The two wires from the samtec cable is the number 10 and 11 wires (corresponding to pin 20 and 22, resp.). I have double checked this.

    I welded the two wires to two extra wires for convenience. I think the welding should be good.

    The PWM output is confirmed by an oscilloscope.

    Then I ran the ROS1 driver with the below cfg, and no radar point clouds are published.

    ```

    % ***************************************************************
    % Created for SDK ver:03.05
    % Created using Visualizer ver:3.6.0.0
    % Frequency:60
    % Platform:xWR68xx_AOP
    % Scene Classifier:best_range
    % Azimuth Resolution(deg):30 + 30
    % Range Resolution(m):0.063
    % Maximum unambiguous Range(m):20
    % Maximum Radial Velocity(m/s):4.02
    % Radial velocity resolution(m/s):0.51
    % Frame Duration(msec):50
    % RF calibration data:None
    % ***************************************************************
    sensorStop
    flushCfg
    dfeDataOutputMode 1
    channelCfg 15 7 0
    adcCfg 2 1
    adcbufCfg -1 0 1 1 1
    profileCfg 0 60 63 7 39.75 0 0 75 1 399 12499 0 0 158
    chirpCfg 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1
    chirpCfg 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 2
    chirpCfg 2 2 0 0 0 0 0 4
    frameCfg 0 2 16 0 45 2 0
    lowPower 0 0
    guiMonitor -1 1 1 0 0 0 1
    cfarCfg -1 0 2 8 4 3 0 15 1
    cfarCfg -1 1 0 4 2 3 1 15 1
    multiObjBeamForming -1 1 0.5
    clutterRemoval -1 0
    calibDcRangeSig -1 0 -5 8 256
    extendedMaxVelocity -1 0
    lvdsStreamCfg -1 0 0 0
    compRangeBiasAndRxChanPhase 0.0 1 0 -1 0 1 0 -1 0 1 0 -1 0 1 0 -1 0 1 0 -1 0 1 0 -1 0
    measureRangeBiasAndRxChanPhase 0 1.5 0.2
    CQRxSatMonitor 0 3 4 97 0
    CQSigImgMonitor 0 97 8
    analogMonitor 0 0
    aoaFovCfg -1 -90 90 -90 90
    cfarFovCfg -1 0 0 19.99
    cfarFovCfg -1 1 -4.05 4.05
    calibData 0 0 0
    sensorStart

    ```

    If I change the frameCfg line to "0 2 16 0 45 1 0", then the point clouds msgs will stream continuously. Note I only changes the trigger mode here.

    I have gone through the requirements about hardware triggering. There are some requirements on the time between frames, and the gap between the end of a frame and the trigger. I am not sure if the above cfg satisfy these requirements.

    Can you please pinpoint what I have missed?

  • 0 in reply to Josh Huai
    TI__Expert 8275 points

    Hi Josh,

    The SDK does not support this feature. Only software trigger is supported over SDK. If you wish to perform HW trigger you may want to use MMWAVE-STUDIO interface.

    Regards

    Ankit

  • 0 in reply to Ankit Mohanty
    Prodigy 20 points

    I think I missed your earlier point "However, HW triggering should be selected in the MMWAVE-STUDIO software Trigger Select option for the device to recognize that each frame would be triggered by rising edge of the SYNC_IN pulse and not software API. " I will learn the MMWave Studio software.

    But it seems I need the DCA1000 board in order to tackle with IWR6843AOPEVM in mmWave studio according to [here](https://e2e.ti.com/support/sensors-group/sensors/f/sensors-forum/959490/iwr6843aopevm-how-to-use-mmwavestudio-with-iwr6843aopevm).

    I can get access to this board in order to run mmWave Studio.

    a. But can I remove DCA1000 from AOPEVM after I have enabled the HW trigger with the mmWave Studio?

    Suppose I have enabled HW trigger in mmWave Studio,

    b. can I viz the radar point clouds with the Demo visualizer (with the frameCfg trigger mode 2)?

    c. can I use the ROS1 driver to get data with the HW trigger enabled?

    Thank you for your assistance.

  • 0 in reply to Josh Huai
    TI__Expert 8275 points

    Hi Josh,

    You can order DCA1000 board here.

    DCA1000EVM Evaluation board | TI.com

    Josh Huai said:
    a. But can I remove DCA1000 from AOPEVM after I have enabled the HW trigger with the mmWave Studio?

    No, you cannot disconnect the DCA1000 board from the AOPEVM. The DCA1000 should send to device a HW trigger notification every frame while you trigger 20 Hz PWM with 3.3 V duration at 1 us at SYNC_IN pin.

    I will pass the thread to software expert for b) and c)

    Regards

    Ankit

  • 0 in reply to Ankit Mohanty
    Prodigy 20 points

    Hi Ankit,

    From our early discussion, we can trigger the AOPEVM with external PWM by blue wiring say the ICBoost socket and a microcontroller. Can this bypass the need for a DCA1000?

    The background is that we have the DCA1000, but we don't want to include it in the final sensor suite as it is bulky.

    Can you please give me some links to the tutorial on using mmWave Studio with DCA1000 + AOPEVM board? I opened the [mmWave studio user guide](dr-download.ti.com/.../mmwave_studio_user_guide.pdf), but was almost lost in the obscure descriptions.

  • 0 in reply to Josh Huai
    TI__Genius 17701 points

    Hi Josh,

    Josh Huai said:
    b. can I viz the radar point clouds with the Demo visualizer (with the frameCfg trigger mode 2)?

    If using Studio, the com ports will be held by the studio application so I don't think you will be able to connect to the device in the visualizer for data visualization. 

    Before going any deeper into this I want to take a step back and just clarify a few things. 

    • The SDK mentions that only software trigger is supported. This means hardware trigger is not tested in the context of the SDK demo. You can try to enable it but since it's not a supported feature we can only provide very limited support in debugging any unexpected behavior.
    • Even with mmWave Studio, hardware trigger is typically used for our frontend-only/cascade devices to synchronize frame triggering across multiple devices. It is not intended for the use case you are trying to achieve.

    With that all being said, there is an old example (which is now deprecated) where SYNC_IN/hw trigger was used for synchronizing multiple EVMs in a robotics application. The hardware platforms are different from what you are using, the host processor which was generating the PWM signal was our SK-TDA4VM and the radar EVM was the IWR1843BOOST because that board allowed for access to the sync in pin through jumpers without modification. I don't think you can use the example directly but it would indicate that it should be possible to enable HW triggering of frames using the SYNC_IN pin without DCA1000/mmWave Studio. Here is a link for your reference: link. 

    Josh Huai said:

    I have gone through the requirements about hardware triggering. There are some requirements on the time between frames, and the gap between the end of a frame and the trigger. I am not sure if the above cfg satisfy these requirements.

    Can you please pinpoint what I have missed?

    I believe you are referring to Note 4 from the timing requirements in the ICD where this gap is required to be > 150us and recommended to be  < 300us. However, I believe the recommendation of < 300us is solely for power consumption savings as discussed in this thread. It seems the frame periodicity in your configuration is set to 45 ms (frameCfg 0 2 16 0 45 2 0) and you mentioned that your pulse frequency is 20 Hz (50ms). So in your case the gap is 5ms. 

    Josh Huai said:
    The PWM output is confirmed by an oscilloscope.

    Where have you probed this? Have are you able to confirm by probing at RA8A on the AOP EVM?

    Best Regards,

    Josh

  • 0 in reply to Josh Dye
    Prodigy 20 points
    Josh Dye said:
    Even with mmWave Studio, hardware trigger is typically used for our frontend-only/cascade devices to synchronize frame triggering across multiple devices. It is not intended for the use case you are trying to achieve.

    IMO, my case is quite similar to the old example you have referred me to. The old example uses a TDA4VM board to generate a PWM wave train and trigger four IWR1843Boost sensor board. My case is to use a STM32F103 board to generate a PWM wave train and trigger a IWR6843AOPEVM board.

    I have gone through that multi_sensor_time_synchronization.md, hw_sync_quad_sensor.launch, and mmWaveSync.cpp.

    It seems to me that the mmWaveSync node has to be used with the TDA4VM. However, internally it just enables the PWM on the TDA4VM linux. So I believe using a custom STM32F103 board should also be able to achieve this.

    Regarding oscilloscope, I only verified the output from the STM32F103 pins that they are 20Hz 3.3V PWM with 1us positive voltage.

    Also with a multimeter, I checked that the two wires, one for PWM connection to the AOPEVM, the other for the ground to the AOPEVM. Both have very low resistance like 7 Ohm. Therefore, the connections look good to me.

    In the next step, I will try the board settings in hw_sync_quad_sensor.launch and see if they work with IWR6843AOP. I am dogged about this because I know someone has succeeded in triggering [IWR6843AOP with a microcontroller](https://e2e.ti.com/support/sensors-group/sensors/f/sensors-forum/1231464/iwr6843aopevm-hardware-triggering-sync_in-pulse-requirements )

    Edit: I tried with the 1843_3d_hw_trig.cfg used by hw_sync_quad_sensor.launch with the IWR6843AOP, and the expected point cloud at triggering did not show up.

    So I modified the 6843AOP_3d.cfg to accommodate the difference between 1843_3d_hw_trig.cfg and 1843_3d.cfg, and the triggering did not work either.

    Then I used the pin 16 and pin 18 of J11 for DCA1000 for sync_in and ground resp., and tried the 6843AOP_3d_hw_trig.cfg. Again, the triggering did not work.

    I guess I have to go for the mmWave Studio with DCA1000EVM board + IWR6843AOPEVM in order to enable hardware triggering.

    **Can you please give me some reference on this?**

    I browsed the mmWave Studio user guide, it does not seem to cover hardware triggering.

  • 0 in reply to Josh Huai
    TI__Expert 8275 points

    Hi Josh,

    Could you please give us some more references on how you are enabling the HW trigger in mmWave studio? Please see the below snapshot, in SensorConfig tab the Trigger select API should be Hardware Select.

    Regards

    Ankit

  • 0 in reply to Ankit Mohanty
    Prodigy 20 points

    Hi Ankit,

    Sorry for the late response. I just saw your update.

    At the moment, I have a DCA1000 board and a IWR6843AOPEVM board, and my computer has the mmWaveStudio installed.

    Please help me get me started.

    If I connect the DCA1000 and the AOPEVM and then connect the DCA1000 to the computer, will the above screen show up?

    Is there any reference manual on setting this up?

    Best regards,

    Josh Huai

  • 0 in reply to Josh Huai
    TI__Expert 8275 points

    Hi Josh,

    If you open the mmWave studio you should be able to see the screen above. You should be able to find all the documents in the below location in docs folder.

    C:\.......\mmwave_studio_02_01_01_00\docs

    Regards

    Ankit

  • 0 in reply to Ankit Mohanty
    Prodigy 20 points

    My user email address was confiscated by my ex university, blinding me to your replies. Sorry for the late reply. I will try it out and keep you updated.