Design and implementation of FMCW radar using raspberry Pi single board computer

Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) radar measures the target's range and velocity by emitting a continuous wave, frequency modulated signal by a sawtooth or triangular function. With this technology, many advantages can be achieved compared to the pulse radar including ability to measure target range and its velocity, ability to measure small ranges to the target. Also, it has better accuracy when comparing to other radar types, and simpler signal processing due to low frequency at baseband. This thesis presents a complete design and implementation of a 6 GHz FMCW radar system using the Raspberry Pi single board computer as a signal processing platform. The proposed system consists of 6 GHz RF front-end architecture, analog to digital interface, and control unit. One of the key challenges in generating FMCW signals is the non-linearity of VCOs, which have been resolved in the proposed design by using a closed loop structure based on fractional-N frequency synthesizer along with VCO. At baseband, a high pass filter used to equalize signal before digital interface stage, which reduce significant differences in power level between close targets and far targets. With the developed radar, the velocity and distance information of the target has been successfully extracted from the signal processing stage of the radar and displayed on the TFT screen.