Collaborate Disseminate
Lasers are pretty much magic — it’s all done with mirrors. Not every laser, of course, but in the 1980s, the most common lasers in commercial applications were probably the …read more Continue reading More Mirrors (and a Little Audio) Mean More Laser Power
Some people hate to revisit projects that are done and dusted. We get that; it’s a little like reading a book you’ve already read when there are so many others …read more Continue reading Doppler Speed Sensor Puts FFT and AGC to Work
When the automobile industry really began to take off in the 1930s, radar was barely in its infancy, and there was no reason to think something that complicated would ever …read more Continue reading Take a Deep Dive Into a Commodity Automotive Radar Chip
If you’re partial to browsing AliExpress, Banggood, or eBay for unusual hardware, you may have seen the HB100 Doppler Radar modules. These are a PCB with a metal can on …read more Continue reading How On-Frequency Are Those Cheap Radar Modules?
If your neighborhood is anything like ours, walking across the street is like taking your life in your own hands. Drivers are increasingly unconcerned by such trivialities as speed limits or staying under control, and anything goes when they need to connect Point A to Point B in the least …read more
Continue reading Keep an Eye on the Neighborhood with This Passive Radar
If you’ve ever cast your eyes towards experimenting with microwave frequencies it’s likely that one of your first ports of call was a cheaply-available Doppler radar module. These devices usually operate in the 10 GHz band, and the older ones used a pair of die-cast waveguide cavities while the newer …read more
Continue reading A Doppler Radar Module From First Principles
There were plenty of great talks at this year’s Supercon, but we really liked the title of Dominic Spill’s talk: Ridiculous Radios. Let’s face it, it is one thing to make a radio or a computer or a drone the way you are supposed to. It is another thing altogether to make one out of things you shouldn’t be using. That’s [Dominic’s] approach. In a quick 30 minutes, he shows you two receivers and two transmitters. What makes them ridiculous? Consider one of the receivers. It is a software designed radio (SDR). How many bits should an SDR have? How …read more
Want to explore the world of radar by feel daunted by the mysteries of radio frequency electronics? Be daunted no more and abstract the RF complexities away with this tutorial on software-defined radar.
Taking inspiration from our own [Gregory L. Charvat], whose many radar projects have graced our pages before, [Luigi Freitas]’ plunge into radar is spare on the budgetary side but rich in learning opportunities. The front end of the radar set is almost entirely contained in a LimeSDR Mini, a software-defined radio that can both transmit and receive. The only additional components are a pair of soup can …read more
Continue reading SDR Is At the Heart of This Soup-Can Doppler Radar Set
If you have even the slightest interest in microwave electronics and radar, you’re in for a treat. The Signal Path is back with another video, and this one covers the internals of a simple 24-GHz radar module along with some experiments that we found fascinating.
The radar module that [Shahriar] works with in the video below is a CDM324 that can be picked up for a couple of bucks from the usual sources. As such it contains a lot of lessons in value engineering and designing to a price point, and the teardown reveals that it contains but a single …read more
Continue reading A Radar Module Teardown And Measuring Fan Speed The Hard Way
When it comes to finding what direction a radio signal is coming from, the best and cheapest way to accomplish the task is usually a Yagi and getting dizzy. There are other methods, and at Shmoocon this last weekend, [Michael Ossmann] and [Schuyler St. Leger] demonstrated pseudo-doppler direction finding using cheap, off-the-shelf software defined radio hardware.
The hardware for this build is, of course, the HackRF, but this pseudo-doppler requires antenna switching. That means length-matched antennas, and switching antennas without interrupts or other CPU delays. This required an add-on board for the HackRF dubbed the Opera Cake. This board is …read more
Continue reading Shmoocon: Delightful Doppler Direction Finding With Software Defined Radio