 This week's item PI, brought to you by Digi-Key, and Adafruit is from Innocent. Lady, what is this week's item PI? This is, they're not guilty. They're Innocent. Yeah. I like that name. Innocentee. This is a German sensor company. I've never actually used their stuff before, so this is always kind of nice when I get to highlight a new electronic developer. There's a lot of small businesses or smaller businesses that make electronic components and sensors and doodads and good stuff, so I'd like to highlight them. So this week's item PI is from them. It is the IMD-2000 UART Output Radar sensor, sorry, 24 gigahertz radar sensor. So how do you want me to tell you to go to the next slide? Oh yeah. Usually I can poke you with it. So this is what it looks like. So this is, you can see the 24 gigahertz antenna on the top, and then on the bottom row there, you see a six pin connector, and we're going to get to that shortly. So this is the datasheet. This is a fairly new product. It's a radar detector, and you can see on the right what it's good for. It's basically like detecting motion, object detection, object counting. It's a 24 gigahertz radio, it can run off of five volts. It's good up to about, I think, 50 meters. Ideal range for detection is 20 meters, and we hadn't featured a radar before, and I've never really used radars, I ate a fruit before, but people are pretty familiar with the concept of a radar. This is a great image from Wikipedia, there's even an animation that goes with it. A lot like sonar, and even IR detectors or even time of flight, kind of any kind of distance or object detection, you are sending some sort of wave, and then you detect the bounce, and when you're using an IR sensor, you're detecting the light, and time of flight, you're detecting the photons that bounce back, and with sonar you're detecting the sound waves, the 40 kilohertz plus sound waves. The radar, you're using multi megahertz, multi gigahertz waves, of course, usually the lower the frequency, the farther that they go, but maybe the less precise the measurement. So it's a balance. Radar has lots of bands, you check out the Wikipedia article, which is really long, and it was kind of fun to read, all about different radar systems and what they're used for. What you probably are most familiar with, radar is, well, first off it was invented, I found out it was invented like in 1905 or so, and was actually used mostly for military applications, as you can imagine, being able to detect a flying metal thing coming at your city from far away is really handy, you want to know before it shows up that these planes or these bombs are coming, and so that these were used a lot in World War II to detect planes, to detect boats, to detect submarines, and what's interesting about this is you can sort of see this is on a platform, it rotates around, because radar, you're sending out the signal and you're reading the bounce back, but it's unidirectional, it's only one point, a lot like LiDAR, and so you have to spin around if you want to get a 360 degree view, which is where the really common air traffic control or military radar, you see something like this where you're detecting, it'll often pick up like other atmosphere effects, but you can see little blips on the radar and then you know, hey, that's a plane coming into the airport and you have to tell it to either come in or pause, and it's usually used of course nowadays in conjunction with GPS and other location, but like radar works really well, it's over 100 years old, it's time tested, we also use it for weather detection and other stuff, but probably what you as a consumer are really familiar with is a radar speed detection gun, this image also from Wikipedia, I never know what they looked like, but this is, they have one that's taken apart too if you want to look at the image, but it's got a radar cone inside of it and it bounces a radar signal also about 20 gigahertz-ish off of a car and by measuring the speed and frequency that comes back, it knows the location, sorry, that it's bounced off of an object and how fast that object is going, this of course brought back flashbacks of this ad which was in every magazine known to me, if you read popular science, this was in there, this was Mike Valentine who made a radar detector, electrical engineer, also interesting story if you're curious, read about it, but he's engineer and as you expect the radar detector for speed detection, you have a very sensitive receiver that would be listening for that frequency and it would detect a little bit, you know somebody's operating a radar in this area, but it's not a common frequency that you'd pick up, anyways, they're still making radar detectors, don't you know? The question is, with sonar and IR and time of flight and even LiDAR, you're probably like, oh yeah, you bounce a thing, the wave off, you see how long it takes for the wave to come back, you divide by the wave speed, you know the distance, and that's a really common thing you want to know with, yeah not PIR, IR, time of flight and LiDAR, but with radar what's interesting is because the frequency is so high, you can take advantage of the Doppler effect and there's, you know, it's great Wikipedia animation, and it's a thing that, you know, as an object's moving, if there's waves emitting from it, like in this case a sound wave of honking horn, as it gets closer to you, the frequency pitch seems to go up and then as it leaves it goes down, so like if you're familiar with sirens, that's why they seem like they have a varying frequency as they pass by you, but really it's one solid frequency or one, you know, one stable frequency, but the sound wave is compressed as it's moving towards you and it's stretched out as it's leaving you, so the same effect can be used with that radar gun, it's shooting this 24 GHz or so frequency wave, electromagnetic wave, and then when the wave comes back, if the object was moving you're going to get some variations in the frequency, if you have a very good detector you can of course use that to determine the speed of the object that you're bouncing the signal off of, very cool and that's how speed detectors work, so it's an interesting, you know, thing that you don't get with IR, time of flight or LiDAR or sonar, you know, so I mentioned IR sensors, you know, compared to IR, radar is going to go much farther, it's not affected by ambient light, it's not affected by the color or afflictivity of the object, with time of flight sensors, these are less affected by ambient light, but they also, you know, they tend not to go more than six meters whereas radars love to go multiple meters and go very far distance, that said you're gonna get more precision out of a time flight sensor, these can do about a millimeter precision, whereas a radar is gonna, I don't know, probably gonna be like a half meter or so of precision of a location, and she did the really good ones, sonar can go very far distances, I like sonars a lot but one of the things that's annoying about them is the cone of the audio wave is quite wide, even, you know, this one has a little cone shaper to it, but even then the spread is quite wide compared to LiDAR or radar, and then of course LiDAR sensors, which, you know, are kind of like time of flight sensors, the amounts of laser off, these are very precise and they're actually being, they're kind of replacing LiDAR, but they're still quite expensive and they're new, so you know, it's, yes they're available, but you know, there's only a couple companies that make consumer grade LiDAR at the same price point as like a radar like this, so this radar module is what I like about this radar module compared to others that you're like, oh I can get like these $3 modules, you know, off eBay or whatever, but those tend to give you a pulse width or sometimes a couple pulses and then you have to like do the math yourself to determine distance and the velocity if they do velocity, what's nice about these modules is they have a UART protocol and so you don't have to do any math really, you just, you just get data out and you can send it directly to your computer or your microcontroller or whatever using their API, which you have to email them to get so I don't have it set up, but it is, you know, 250 kilobots, so it is like a standard UART protocol output and it can detect multiple items up to 50 meters away and the pinout is even that FTDI compatible, how handy is that, so if you do get this module, you know, basically you can skip a lot of the analog front-to-end work that you would normally do with low-cost radar and you get the data out and it's like pre-processed and formatted and ready to go, so that's why I would recommend this for if you have a product or project and you want to just kind of get going fast because if you get a low-cost radar you're gonna have to spend a lot of time mucking around with the signal to get the data you want and then maybe you're not even sure that it's quite good, sometimes there's a high pulse and a low pulse and you have to like take the differential of it, so it's why you don't see people use radar that often, but there's like a thousand of them available so you can pick them up and then you'll have to register and to get an account to get the software but apparently there's desktop software for Windows you can pick up, I would highly recommend the company to just make it available so you don't have to register to get it, but then you know you could also get the API for the UART protocol and then use it with any mic control, you don't necessarily have to use a desktop software all, so I think this is kind of like an easy way to get started with radar sensing for you know people counting, for motion detection, you know sometimes it can go through materials as well if it's translucent to high-frequency gigahertz, so do check it out I think it's a new it's a new kind of sensor that I haven't used before, I mean it's an old sensor, but it's what I haven't used but I think it could come in very handy when you need that precision range and of course velocity measurement. Alright and we have a video, it's about two minutes we're gonna play it. The abbreviation radar stands for radio detection and ranging. The radar emits electromagnetic waves which travel at the speed of light. These waves will bounce off objects on their way and a part of the energy will be reflected back to the radar as an echo. The radar can precisely measure movement, velocity, direction, presence, distance and angle of an object. We offer you a wide range of solutions for a vast range of applications. Let's start with home automation. With radar-based touchless switches we make your home more comfortable and energy efficient. Radar systems from us are not limited to basic motion detection, they also perform tasks like speed measurement, vehicle counting and classification. Our radar-based motion detectors and barriers are not limited to indoor security. They also ensure complete perimeter protection for critical infrastructure outdoors. Autonomous machines equipped with radar detectors scan their surroundings, navigate around obstacles and avoid collisions. Our radar modules open doors and gates. They can precisely measure your sporting performance and in driver assistance systems they help you drive safely. In this example the level of fluids or bog material is measured in a contactless manner. The general advantage of the radar is that detectors can be integrated invisibly behind a wide range of materials. This makes them robust against environmental influences and vandalism. Good to know radars work in the dark as well. Works in any weather. Works in extreme conditions like heat, dust, steam and dirt. We are a market leading cost-effective manufacturer of radar sensors and radar systems in high volume. And that is this week's eye on MPI.