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I am a researcher at the University of Cambridge, and our lab is currently evaluating hardware for an upcoming project focused on high-precision, phase-based surface micro-vibration sensing. We are looking into procuring the Texas Instruments IWR1843BOOST evaluation board (DigiKey Part Number: 296-IWR1843BOOST-ND).
Before placing an institutional order, we want to ensure this device is the right fit for our technical requirements. I’m hoping a DigiKey technical representative or community member experienced with TI’s mmWave line could clarify a few points:
Phase Sensitivity for Vibrations: Does the IWR1843 platform readily support sub-millimeter displacement and phase-based vibration monitoring out of the box, or are there specific TI reference designs/firmware we should look into for this application?
macOS Developer Ecosystem: Our primary development environment is macOS. Since TI’s standard mmWave Studio is Windows-centric, is it feasible to bypass it and capture raw ADC or parsed object data directly via Python/Serial streams on a Mac?
Technical Guidance: Is there a product specialist or Field Applications Engineer (FAE) we could connect with to help guide us through the features of this device during our assessment phase?
Any insights, documentation recommendations, or advice from anyone who has used this board for micro-motion sensing would be greatly appreciated!
A description of the out-of-the-box demo for this platform can be found in the Out Of Box Demo User Guide. It’s mainly meant to demonstrate object detection and ranging capabilities. This is a fairly typical demo application for this type of product and I personally haven’t come across any demos/examples which directly provide measures of sub-mm displacement. I believe the reference designs/firmware you would be most interested in are those related to vital signs monitoring (heart rate detection is based on sub-mm displacements of the chest cavity). Unfortunately, TI 1) does not appear to offer an implementation of vital signs monitoring for the IWR1843BOOST and 2) does not provide the source code for vital signs monitoring demos with the SDK.
As @RobertCNelson pointed out and as TI addressed on their Forum, MacOS is not supported at this time. There are some things you can do with it, but the source code provided in the SDK is only supported by Windows or Linux.
Furthermore, depending on your needs, streaming the raw ADC data in real time may require pairing the IWR1843BOOST with the DCA1000EVM.
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