I built a mmWave material classification radar
55 points
by GL26
2 hours ago
| 8 comments
| gauthier-lechevalier.com
| HN
Havoc
2 minutes ago
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Kinda crazy that it worked but got no commercial interest. Hopefully someone suitable here sees it and can intervene

Does it also work through other materials. i.e. through a drywall etc.

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amirhirsch
1 hour ago
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Very cool! Six years ago I worked on a mmWave (76-81GHz) imaging radar with a Rotman lens Tx and Rx. Designed as a LiDAR replacement, but we could see pipes in walls, or detect concealed weapons at ~1km.
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mlmonkey
55 minutes ago
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Do you have a writeup about the project? I'd love to read more about it.
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GL26
1 hour ago
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How many tx and rx antennas did you have ? (I don’t know if it was clear, my stack was 57-64 GHz, 2TX , 3RX)
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amirhirsch
1 hour ago
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32 port Tx (vertical pancake beams) x 16 port Rx (horizontal pancake), something like 60 by 30 degrees. the entire thing used FPGA transceivers as one-bit DAC/ADC, Complementary Golay Code waveforms with one-bit correlation in the FPGAs (two VCU128s) -- digital logic was essentially the same as a binarized neural network, I squeezed a ton of popcnt performance out of those chips using both DSPs and LUTs
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tim-tday
1 hour ago
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So thankful the author posted this. We often learn more from failure than success. Learning from the failures of others is how we can move forward. The lessons learned at the bottom of the article are gold.
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GL26
29 minutes ago
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thank you so much for your feedback, it was hard to admit defeat, but at the end looking back at what I built, the parts where I learnt about RF, and just struggled, refactoring the code for the sim (thank god cc is not good enough to understand real world physics functionning for now) were the most satisfying moments
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EtienneDeLyon
27 minutes ago
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Was this AI comment necessary?

If you'd like to learn more about the module:

https://www.ti.com/tool/IWRL6432BOOST

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nilsherzig
27 minutes ago
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love the background music in combination with the flying fishes wallpaper in the first video haha

very cool project

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GL26
3 minutes ago
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hahaha ! oops didn't mute the video, would blast trap music when I was alone in the lab x)
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JellyPlan
36 minutes ago
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Hugged to death but I'd love to see this!
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GL26
34 minutes ago
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My netlify crashed fixing the website rn
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GL26
31 minutes ago
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just fixed it, hope it works
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arikrahman
1 hour ago
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That's awesome. I built one for a capstone back in the day and know how tough it is to get onboarded. Kudos.
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marking-time
1 hour ago
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Terrific project!
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GL26
29 minutes ago
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thanks :) !!
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