SparkFun Offers 60GHz Pulsed Coherent Radar with Latest Raspberry Pi Add-on Board

Communicating over SPI at up to 50MHz, this board makes it easy to get highly-accurate positioning data — on ARMv7 or Cortex-M4, at least.

Gareth Halfacree
2 years agoSensors

SparkFun has launched a new revision of its breakout board for the Acconeer A111 60GHz pulsed coherent radar (PCR) chip — and it's designed for easy mounting on the top of a Raspberry Pi or compatible single-board computer.

"Does your project require high-precision, cutting-edge distance measurement? Or maybe speed, motion, or gesture-sensing," SparkFun writes of its latest launch. "We're not talking about simple ultrasonic or even infrared here, but 60GHz radar! Well say hello to the SparkFun A111 Pulsed Radar Breakout."

Now in v1.1, SparkFun's 60GHz radar breakout offers highly-accurate readings up to six and a half feet. (📹: SparkFun)

Built around the Acconeer A111 single-chip PCR, the breakout offers 2.54mm pin headers for SPI communication at up to 50MHz alongside a part-size Raspberry Pi-friendly general-purpose input/output (GPIO) header for quick solder-free mounting. Featuring an integrated antenna, the device should be plug-and-play — with one caveat: processor compatibility.

According to SparkFun's testing, the A111 — and by extension the breakout — is compatible with ARMv7 processors and Arm Cortex-M4 microcontrollers. As a result, it'll work fine with modern Raspberry Pi models including the Raspberry Pi 3, Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+/B+, and Raspberry Pi 4 — but won't work on ARMv6 devices like the popular Raspberry Pi Zero.

The chip offers a measurement distance of up to six and a half feet with accuracy down below 0.04". The 1.8V part has full logic level translation to the 3.3V required by the Raspberry Pi's GPIO header — an improvement over the original v1.0 design, the company notes — and can be optionally set to any level from 1.8V to 5V.

For visualisation, SparkFun is recommending a Python tool written by Acconeer: The Exploration Tool. "As an example it will graph distance or presence sensing," SparkFun notes, "giving you a count of the number of sweeps, which communication port (SPI or I2C) data is being sent through, and much much more."

The Pulsed Radar Breakout is now available on SparkFun, priced at $59.95; the Acconeer Exploration Tool has been published to GitHub under the permissive Clear BSD license. More details are available on SparkFun's Getting Started guide.

Gareth Halfacree
Freelance journalist, technical author, hacker, tinkerer, erstwhile sysadmin. For hire: freelance@halfacree.co.uk.
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