A111 Pulsed Radar Board gets Sparked with GroupGets!
After a short time in retirement, the SparkX A111 Breakout Board is coming back to life as part of the Get Sparked program!
Does your project require high-precision, cutting-edge distance measurement? Or maybe speed, motion or gesture sensing? We're not talking about simple ultrasonic, or even infrared, sensors here, but 60GHz radar! Well say hello to our tiny, pulsed-radar friend: the Acconeer A111. After a short time in retirement, the SparkX A111 Breakout Board is coming back in collaboration with GroupGets as part of the Get Sparked program!
The A111 is a single-chip solution for pulsed coherent radar (PCR). It comes complete with integrated antennae and an SPI interface capable of clock speeds of up to 50MHz. The A111's primary use case is distance-sensing, but it also supports applications in gesture, motion, material and speed detection. It can see objects at distances of up to two meters.
Our breakout board for the A111 includes a 1.8V regulator, voltage-level translation between 1.8V and either 3.3V or 5V and of course, it breaks out all pins of the pulsed radar sensor to both 0.1-inch and Raspberry Pi-friendly headers. The breakout board is primarily designed to interface directly with a Raspberry Pi – Acconeer’s SDK previously only supported ARMv7’s (e.g. a Pi) and ARM Cortex-M4’s (e.g. the nRF52832). Acconeer has been hard at work with software updated to their SDK - truthfully more that we could keep up with at SparkFun! However, have a solution in process and we are working on a transition to reds so this board will come with all the standard documentation, guides and support of a full SparkFun product! Pre-orders are open through September 22nd on Group Gets now.
Check out our Using the A111 Pulsed Radar Breakout tutorial, which explains how to use the sensor with a Raspberry Pi.
