Development of Low Cost Navigation Radar using Raspberry Pi Board

Frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) radar has advantages in resolution at near range and need low power at transmitter compared with pulse-type radar. The main component of these type radar is linear frequency modulated (LFM) signal generator and radar signal processing. Commonly radar signal processing unit uses a personal computer which has a high price and needs another device to control the LFM chirp generator module. Raspberry Pi type 3 (RPi3) is a single board computer which consists of a standard input-output like serial peripheral interface (SPI) and cheaper than the personal computer. RPi3 will be implemented on FMCW radar for a navigation system at x-band frequency 9.3 GHz. RPi3 will perform to collect data from received signal through analog to digital conversion (ADC) module, control LMF module and variable gain amplifier (VGA) through the serial peripheral interface (SPI), range processing and send the data over TCP/IP. The algorithm developed using Python code. The experiment shows that the RPi3 board can configure HMC769LP6CE LFM chirp generator with various bandwidth depend on range radar and VGA trough SPI bus. RPi3 can collect data from the USB2020 ADC module and determine range position of the target based on FFT.