RadarOnAStick

Project RadarOnAStick
A doppler radar sensor connected to a PSOC5 DevKit, outputting the IQ-signals over USB stereo audio
Status	Initializing
Contact	bertrik
Last Update	2016-02-14

"Everything is better on-a-stick!"

Status

2016-02-14 Created this page

Concept

The basic idea is to take a relatively inexpensive bistatic doppler radar sensor and connect it to a PSOC5 development kit:

• the doppler radar sensor is this RSM2650 doppler sensor. It works at 24 GHz and outputs low-frequency I and Q signals. Having both the I and Q components allows you to sense not just *speed* of movement but also *direction* of movement.
• this PSOC5 development kit which can be bought for about E10,- at Farnell. This PSOC5 development-kit combines a powerful Cortex-M3 processor with several programmable analog blocks, like analog amplifiers , opamps, and analog-digital converters. It kit already contains some example code for implementing USB devices.

The goal of this project is to create an easy-to-use integrated doppler-radar-module that outputs the complex radar signals over USB audio. The left and right signals represent the I and Q components of the complex radar signal respectively, ready for further processing.

The plan is for the doppler radar sensor to be connected with as little as possible "glue electronics" to the PSOC dev-kit. I want to use the GnuRadio framework to process and visualize the complex radar signal. GnuRadio is already capable of using USB-audio like devices as a signal input, for example the FUNcube dongle.

A possible application of such an integrated sensor-module is to sense the movement of bats as they fly in and out of their roost of hibernation place. In this application, the radar-on-a-stick could be put into the USB-port of a small Linux board (like a Raspberry Pi), which takes care of recording the signal, high-level processing like classification and communication with the outside world.